What to ask for
Four sentences for whoever sets the week
Written for the person who decides how a team's week runs. Four sentences, about ninety seconds, and they supply most of what a hybrid policy is reaching for.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Wednesday, the second week
3 of 7Planning day
Wednesday, the fourth week
3 of 7The new starter's first day
Thursday, the fifth week
1 of 7three days · 21 hours logged · seven of them were only possible there · one was made worse by being there
The three days worth asking for more of.
When a hybrid policy measures attendance but not outcomes, managers can read the implementation overview and add project-time evidence to a more useful conversation about what different locations enable.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by VentureBeat.
The whole quarter, by the day of the week it landed on
34 days in the building across five weekdays · 23 of them on just two of the days, Wednesday and Tuesday · the hours that needed the building fell hardest on Wednesday, seventeen of them · on Monday and Friday nothing at all required being there
Thirteen weeks under a three-day policy that named no days.
This page is addressed to a different reader from the rest of the site. Not the person travelling in because a policy said a number, but the person who decides how a team's week runs — which is usually a line manager, and usually somebody who did not write the policy and cannot change the count.
Four sentences are available to you that the policy is not using. They take about ninety seconds and they supply most of what it is reaching for.
One: name the day
We are in on Wednesdays.
Not a requirement. A statement of fact about when you and the work will be there. It removes the coordination problem, which is the single largest failure in the arrangement, and it costs nobody any freedom they were actually using.
Before you pick it, ask each person privately whether any weekday is impossible. Not whether it suits them — whether it is impossible. The answers will be few and they will be real, and finding them out afterwards is much more expensive.
Two: say what the day is for
Wednesdays are for the things that need all of us in a room: the planning, the arguments that writing has not settled, and whoever is new.
This is what makes the day survive. A named day with nothing in it decays within a term into a crowded room with no desks. Move one recurring thing onto it and it holds.
It also makes the day judgeable, which means the arrangement can improve rather than just persist.
Three: say where you sit
We are at the north end of the third floor when we are in.
The smallest sentence here and worth more than it looks. The valuable hour has a range of about ten metres, and unassigned seating under a day-count policy routinely scatters a team across three floors, removing the mechanism the attendance was bought for.
Four: ask the question nobody asks
How long is your journey, door to door?
Ask it once, of everybody, and say your own first. On the team recorded here the range was eighteen minutes to one hour and twenty-five, the policy had been discussed three times, and nobody knew.
A rule that costs one person an hour and fifty minutes a week and another eight and a half is not uniform, and it reads as uniform only to those who have never seen the far end of the distribution.
What these four do not do
They do not reduce the count, change the policy or help with the travel. They are not a substitute for a better rule and they do not pretend the rule is good.
What they do is make the days that are going to happen anyway land better, and every one of them is within the gift of the person reading this. On the quarter recorded here, all four together would have been worth more than removing a day.
What each sentence is worth, on this record
| Sentence | What it addresses | Estimated effect |
|---|---|---|
| We are in on Wednesdays | Nine days of zero overlap | Most of them |
| Wednesdays are for things that need all of us | Days with no purpose | The decay problem |
| We sit at the north end | Nine days at a desk two floors away | Six of the nine |
| How long is your journey? | A spread nobody knew about | The far end becoming sayable |
The estimates are from one quarter and should be read as indications. What is not an estimate is the cost: four sentences, one private round of questions, and about ninety seconds.
What this does not ask you to do
It does not ask you to break a policy, reduce anybody's days, grant an exception, or take a position on whether the requirement is right.
Everything here is compatible with a three-day rule and with enforcing one. The four sentences operate inside whatever the count is; they determine what the days contain, which is the part no count addresses.
That is worth stating plainly because the usual reaction to a site like this is to read it as an argument for coming in less, and a manager reading it that way will dismiss the four sentences along with everything else. They are not that argument. They are the thing that would make the current arrangement work better, written by somebody who lived under it for thirteen weeks.
The one that is hardest and matters most
The fourth. Asking how long everybody's journey is feels intrusive and is not, and alone among these four it has no indirect version.
Ask it once, give your own first, and do not do anything with the answers except know them. Nothing needs to change as a result. What changes is that the next time the arrangement is discussed, you are not the only person in the room who knows that the rule costs one of your team eight and a half hours a week and another one hour and forty-eight minutes.