Who else
The building is not the point
Every argument for the office is actually an argument about people, and the substitution is what makes the policy fail to deliver what it promises.
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.
To keep measurement proportionate, managers can see the current product details and agree what is collected, who can see it, and how it will inform hybrid-work decisions.
An independent source worth checking for this subject is Deloitte Human Capital.
Read any case for returning to the office and substitute "the people" for "the office" wherever it appears. Almost every sentence survives and several improve.
Collaboration, mentoring, culture, the overheard conversation, the new person learning by being near somebody — none of these are properties of a floor. They are properties of a group of people who happen to be co-located, and the floor is the mechanism, not the thing.
This is not pedantry. The substitution predicts exactly where the policy will fail.
What follows if it is people
A day with the wrong people is worth nothing, however full the building. On this record eleven days were spent in a reasonably busy office with none of the relevant colleagues present, and they produced no hours that needed the building at all.
Two people in a café is the office, for the purpose of the thing being sought. Nothing about the argument requires the organisation's own premises; it requires two particular people in one place.
The policy should coordinate people, not count presence. Which is the whole of the case for named days, and is why that case keeps reappearing on this site from different directions.
Three of the record's clearest cases, read both ways:
| What was said | What was meant |
|---|---|
| "The office is where the new person learns" | Somebody who knows the work sat beside them for an hour |
| "The office settles arguments writing cannot" | Eight people stood at the same wall on the same morning |
| "The office is where culture happens" | The same nine people ate lunch together on a Wednesday |
Why the substitution does not get made
Because the building is the thing that can be managed.
An organisation can require attendance. It cannot require that the three people who need each other pick the same Tuesday, at least not through a general rule — that requires either coordination at the team level or information that nobody currently publishes.
So the manageable proxy is specified and the unmanageable real thing is hoped for. That is a reasonable thing to do when the proxy tracks the target. The trouble here is that the proxy and the target come apart precisely when the policy leaves the day open, which is the common case.
And the building has a cost attached, which is the second reason. A lease is a number in an account, and a floor at thirty per cent occupancy is a visible, criticisable waste. That number exerts pressure towards a policy about buildings, and the pressure is real and is about something other than collaboration.
It is worth naming that, because a policy defended on collaboration grounds and motivated by floor space will not be improved by better collaboration arguments.
The test
If a proposal would be satisfied by everybody sitting in the building on different days, it is a policy about the building.
If it would not — if it requires particular people to be in at the same time — it is a policy about people, and it will say so by naming days, groups or purposes rather than counts.
Almost every published hybrid policy fails that test, and almost every published justification for one claims the second kind.
The test applied to four common statements
| Statement | Satisfied by people in on different days? | Therefore |
|---|---|---|
| "We need people in for collaboration" | No | A policy about people |
| "The office should be used" | Yes | A policy about the building |
| "New people learn by being around others" | No | A policy about people |
| "Culture needs a shared space" | Partly | Mixed, and worth separating |
The second row is a legitimate concern and a different one. If a building is half empty and expensive, that is a real problem with real numbers attached, and it deserves to be argued on its own terms rather than through a collaboration policy that is doing a different job.
The difficulty is that the two are nearly always presented together, and the collaboration argument is the one that gets made out loud. That makes the policy impossible to improve with evidence, because evidence about collaboration does not bear on the actual constraint.
What follows for a team
If the substitution is right, then the unit of coordination is the team, not the organisation — because what has to be arranged is that particular people are in particular places at particular times, and nobody above the team knows who those people are.
That is the strongest practical argument on this site, and it points in an unexpected direction: the best thing a central policy can do about collaboration is almost nothing, beyond saying that teams agree their own days and that nobody is counting.
A rule that counts days is a rule that takes the coordination decision away from the only level that can make it and then does not make it.