Reading a policy for its silences

The six

Which days? If unspecified, the coordination problem is handed to individuals who cannot solve it. This is the largest silence and the most consequential.

What counts as a day? If unspecified, the answer becomes whatever the measurement system counts, which is usually a badge swipe. A day is then a swipe, and the policy is about swipes.

Who may vary it, and how? If unspecified, variation happens by private arrangement with individual managers, which means it happens unevenly and invisibly.

What is it for? If unspecified — and it nearly always is, beyond a sentence about collaboration — no day can be judged against a purpose, so the arrangement cannot be improved by evidence.

What happens if it is not working? If there is no review, no measure and no route to raise it, the policy is permanent by default regardless of what it produces.

What was agreed before? If the policy does not say how it interacts with existing arrangements, people hired under different terms will find out individually, one at a time, in conversations they did not expect.

What the silences have in common

Each one pushes a decision down to a level with less information and less authority than the level that wrote the document.

No one arranged this. It falls out of writing a document that has to be short and has to apply everywhere. But the effect is that the hardest parts of the arrangement are decided by whoever is least placed to decide them, and the policy can then be described as working, because nothing that happens afterwards is measured against it.

The useful use of this list

Not to criticise the document. To work out, before any conversation, who you are actually talking to about any given issue.

If the days are unspecified, the person to talk to is whoever sets your team's week — not HR, not a policy, and no change to any document is needed. That is the single most common mistake in these conversations: taking an issue created by a silence to the people who wrote the words.

Reading the clauses that are there

The sentences a hybrid policy does contain are worth reading too, and three phrases recur often enough to be worth translating.

"A minimum of three days." The word minimum is doing work. It converts a target into a floor, which means any downward variation is a breach rather than a judgement, and it removes the possibility of a week that is sensibly lighter.

"Where business needs allow." This reads as flexibility and operates as the opposite. It makes variation conditional on a justification, and the justification has to be offered by the person seeking it, to somebody who did not write the rule and cannot be seen to be lax with it.

"Teams may agree local arrangements within this framework." The most useful sentence that appears in these documents, and the most widely ignored, usually because nobody reads past the number. If your policy contains it, almost everything on this site is available to your team without anybody's permission.

What to do with the reading

Two things, in order.

First, find out whether your policy contains the third sentence or anything like it. Many do. It is normally in the last third of the document, after the part about the number, which is where people stop reading.

Second, take each issue to the level that owns it. The silences are owned locally; the number is owned centrally. Raising a local issue centrally produces nothing and consumes the goodwill you would need for the other conversation.

Five of the six are local. Almost every conversation on this subject is about the sixth.