The policy
The exception nobody wrote down
Unwritten arrangements are granted to the people who can afford to ask. What that does to a rule, and why the fix is writing them down rather than removing them.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Monday, the third week
0 of 7Came in to make up a day missed through illness
Wednesday, the third week
1 of 7Tuesday, the second week
0 of 7three days · 21 hours logged · one of them was only possible there · two of the three days contained no such hour at all · four were made worse by being there
Three days the policy treats as identical.
For teams moving between home and office, it helps to view the available features and compare time, attendance, and work patterns without treating presence as the result itself.
An independent source worth checking for this subject is The Verge.
Almost every hybrid policy generates exceptions within a term, and almost none of them are written anywhere.
They are reasonable. Somebody has a standing commitment, somebody lives four hours away, somebody negotiated something at hiring. Each one is granted by one manager in one conversation, and nothing records that it happened.
The individual arrangements are usually fine. The aggregate is not.
What an unwritten exception does
It makes the rule depend on your manager. Two people in identical circumstances, in two teams, get different answers. Neither finds out, because neither knows the other asked.
It is granted to whoever asks. And asking is not evenly distributed. It requires knowing that asking is possible, believing the answer might be yes, and being able to afford a no. On every one of those three, the people who most need the exception are the least equipped to seek it.
It cannot be relied on. An unwritten arrangement survives exactly as long as the manager who granted it. Reorganisations end these quietly and often, and the person affected has nothing to point at.
It distorts the record. The policy appears to be working at full compliance, because the exceptions are invisible. The number that gets reviewed in six months is wrong, and so is the conclusion drawn from it.
The shape it takes
| What the policy says | What is actually happening |
|---|---|
| Three days a week, everyone | Three days for most, two for four people, one for one |
| Exceptions by agreement | Exceptions by asking, which not everybody does |
| Consistent across teams | Different in each team, by a factor of two |
| Reviewed against attendance | Reviewed against a figure that excludes the exceptions |
Why the answer is not "no exceptions"
The uniform version is worse. Circumstances genuinely differ, and a rule with no give in it either breaks people or gets ignored, usually both.
The answer is to write them down — not centrally, not as a register of who has been granted what, which would be its own problem, but at the level of the team, as part of what the arrangement is.
We are in on Wednesdays. B is not, because of a standing commitment; B and I do a Tuesday instead. That is the arrangement, not a favour.
Two sentences. They convert a private concession into a public fact, which has three effects: it does not need re-asking, it does not depend on the manager staying, and it tells the next person in the same situation that the thing is available without them having to risk the question.
The test for whether yours is written down
If a new manager arrived next month, would your arrangement survive without you having to make the case again?
If the answer is no, it is a favour rather than an arrangement, and it is worth converting while the person who granted it is still there.
Who ends up with one
The distribution is the part worth looking at, because it is not random and it is not related to need.
An exception requires three things: knowing that asking is possible, believing the answer might be yes, and being able to afford a no. Those three correlate with tenure, with confidence, with having a manager you know well, and with not being in a probationary period or on a visa or in any other position where a refusal carries extra weight.
They do not correlate with having a long journey, a caring responsibility, or a health condition — which are the circumstances the exceptions would ideally be tracking.
So the people who end up with informal arrangements are disproportionately the ones who could most easily have managed without. That is not anybody's intention and it is the predictable output of a system where the only route to variation is asking.
The three-question test
For anybody who has an informal arrangement, three questions worth answering honestly:
- Is it written anywhere that would survive your manager leaving?
- Would a colleague in your situation know it was available?
- Could you describe it to a new manager in one sentence without it sounding like a favour?
Three noes means it is a concession rather than an arrangement, and concessions end quietly. The usual moment is a reorganisation, and the usual form is not a withdrawal but a new manager who simply does not know.
Writing it down without making it a register
The fear is that documenting exceptions creates a list of who gets special treatment, which is its own problem.
The way round it is to write the arrangement rather than the exception — to describe what the team does, with the variation included as part of the description rather than as a departure from it:
We are in on Wednesdays, except B, who has a standing commitment; B and C do a Tuesday instead.
Nothing in that sentence is a concession. It is a statement of how the team works, it survives a change of manager, and it tells the next person in B's situation that the thing is possible without them having to ask first.