Who else
How to find out who is in
The highest-value change on this record costs nine messages a week and no system at all.
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.
Where work is split across locations, managers can review the setup information to make project effort and recurring bottlenecks clear enough for a transparent capacity discussion.
For a separate perspective on technology, privacy, or flexible work, consult Acas.
Of everything in this quarter, the change with the best return was not a policy, an exception or a negotiation. It was information that already existed in nine separate heads and was never assembled.
Five of the nine days with zero overlap would have moved to a different weekday if the person had known, the evening before, that nobody would be in. That is ten hours and fifty minutes of travel returned, for nothing.
The smallest version that works
One message, in whatever the team already uses, on a Friday afternoon:
Next week: Tue/Wed — A, C, D. Wed only — B, F. Thu — E. Not in — G, H, J.
That is the whole mechanism. Nine names, no commitment, no record kept beyond the week. It takes the person who writes it about ninety seconds if everybody replies to a thread, and it supplies the one input nobody currently has.
The rules that keep it from turning into something else
This is the part that matters, because the same information in a slightly different frame becomes a monitoring tool, and once it does, it stops being accurate.
- It is a forecast, not a commitment. Changing your mind is expected and does not require telling anybody.
- Nothing is kept. Last week's message is not looked at. There is no history, no total, no pattern anybody is tracking.
- It never leaves the team. It is not reported upwards, not aggregated, not used in any conversation about compliance.
- "Not in" needs no reason. The moment a reason is expected the list becomes an account of absence.
- It is written by the team, not requested of them. If it comes from above it is a return, whatever it says on it.
Those five rules are not decoration. A plan-sharing habit that breaks any of them will be quietly gamed inside a month, and a gamed forecast is worse than none, because it is believed.
Why it is rare
Mostly because it looks like something that should already exist. Every organisation has a calendar, most have a desk-booking system, and several have badge data, so the information feels as though it is somewhere.
It is not. The calendar shows meetings, not locations. The booking system shows who booked, which is a minority. The badge data shows yesterday, which is the wrong day. None of them answers the only question that matters, which is who will be in tomorrow.
What it does not fix
It does not fix the policy, reduce the travel or create a purpose for a day. It makes the days you are already required to take land better, which on this record was worth about a third of the quarter's value, and it is available this week without asking anybody for permission.
What it looked like when it was tried
Started by one person, in week nine, with a single message:
I am in Tue/Wed this week. Anyone else?
Four replies the first week, seven the second, and by the fourth week it had become a thread on Friday afternoons that most of the team posted into without being asked.
Nothing was announced. Nobody called it an initiative. The reason it worked is that it was obviously useful to the person reading it rather than to anybody above them, which is the property that distinguishes it from every attendance-tracking system that has ever been introduced.
What changed in the five weeks it ran
| Before (weeks 1–8) | After (weeks 9–13) | |
|---|---|---|
| Days with zero team overlap | 7 of 21 | 2 of 13 |
| Median colleagues present | 2 | 4 |
n hours per office day |
0.7 | 1.5 |
| Travel | Unchanged | Unchanged |
The sample is small and it covers five weeks, so the figures should be read as an indication rather than a result. What is not ambiguous is the direction, and the mechanism is not mysterious: people moved their third day towards where the people were, because for the first time they could see where that was.
The failure mode to watch for
The thread becomes a record. Somebody starts referring to it — "you said you would be in on Tuesday" — and within a fortnight the forecasts become cautious, then vague, then absent.
The protection is the rule that nothing is kept and nothing is expected. A plan is a forecast; changing it needs no explanation and produces no comment. If that cannot be held, the thread is better not started, because an inaccurate forecast that everyone believes is worse than none.