Who else
Being seen is not being with
Two reasons to be in the building that get bundled together and point in different directions. Separating them changes what you ask for.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Thursday, the third week
0 of 7Two floors from anyone known
Wednesday, the first week
2 of 7Thursday, the first week
0 of 7Nobody from the team was in
three days · 21 hours logged · two of them were only possible there · two of the three days contained no such hour at all · three were made worse by being there
Three days chosen for the gap between being in and being together.
Before adding another fixed office day, teams can learn about the available tools to check whether capacity, coordination, or project design is the real constraint.
Teams can compare this approach with current guidance available from SHRM.
There are two quite different reasons to be in the building, and most policies, most arguments and most individual decisions fold them into one.
Being with. Working alongside particular people so that the unscheduled hour can occur. This is the mechanism described everywhere else on this site.
Being seen. Being observed to be present, by people who are in a position to form views about you. This is about standing rather than work.
Both are real. They respond to different actions and they are satisfied on different days, and treating them as one thing produces decisions that serve neither.
Where they come apart
Being with is satisfied by two or three specific colleagues on the same day, anywhere — a meeting room, a café, a quiet floor.
Being seen is satisfied by a crowded room on the day the senior people are in, which may be a day when none of your actual collaborators are present.
On this record those were different days about a third of the time. One of the thirty-four trips is logged as "came in to be seen", and it was honest: no work required it, nothing in the calendar involved anybody in the building, and it produced zero hours of the first kind.
The two, side by side:
| Being with | Being seen | |
|---|---|---|
| Satisfied by | Two or three specific colleagues | A full room on the day senior people are in |
| Best day | Whichever day they are in | Whichever day is busiest |
| Where it can happen | Anywhere the right people are | The organisation's own premises |
| Produces | Hours of the first kind | Standing |
| Can be asked for openly | Yes | Rarely |
Why bundling them is expensive
Because the bundled version makes the valuable thing unaskable.
Once attendance is understood as partly about standing, a request to change which days you come in reads as a request to be seen less, which reads as a signal about commitment. So the person who wants to move a day to improve overlap — a purely operational request — has to spend social capital to make it, and often does not.
It also lets a weak case ride on a strong one. "We need people in for collaboration" is a strong case. "We would like to see people" is a weaker one that many organisations would rather not make in those words, and it is considerably easier to make if the two are never distinguished.
What to do about it individually
Decide which one a given day is for, before you go, and stop expecting the other.
If a day is for being seen, go on the day the room is full, accept that nothing will get done, and do not count it as a work day in your own ledger. If it is for being with, pick the day by who is in and not by how busy it will be.
The clarity is worth something on its own. Most of the frustration in the record came from days that were implicitly doing the second job while being judged by the first standard.
What to do about it collectively
Say which one the policy is for. A policy that is honestly about presence and visibility can be argued with on its own terms. A policy about collaboration can be tested against whether collaboration happened.
The one that cannot be improved is the policy that claims the second and measures the first, because every piece of evidence that it is not working can be answered by pointing at the attendance figures.
The day logged as "came in to be seen"
It is worth being honest about this one, because it is the only entry in the record with no work justification at all.
A Monday. Nothing in the calendar involving anybody in the building, no colleagues from the team in, no room needed. The reason for the journey was that it had been a quiet fortnight, a reorganisation was being discussed, and being around felt prudent.
Two hours and ten minutes of travel, seven hours of work identical to the work that would have happened at home, two of them worse for the room. Zero hours of the first kind.
Whether it achieved its purpose is unknowable, which is the defining property of the whole category.
Why the unmeasurable one wins arguments
Because a claim that cannot be tested cannot be disproved by a record.
The thirty-one hours can be disputed on method, scope or representativeness, and should be. "People need to be seen" cannot be disputed at all — not because it is strong, but because it specifies no mechanism and no outcome, so no observation bears on it.
In any argument where one side has a falsifiable claim and the other has an unfalsifiable one, the unfalsifiable one survives contact better. That is not evidence that it is right.
Asking which one the policy is for
The question is reasonable, it is rarely asked out loud, and it changes what can be discussed:
Is Wednesday about getting the work done together, or about people being around?
Either answer is workable. "Together" makes the day testable and improvable. "Around" is at least honest and lets everybody stop pretending the day is about collaboration when it is about presence.
The unanswerable version is the one where the day is described as the first and managed as the second, because every piece of evidence that the first is not happening is met with figures about the second.