Who else
The day nobody from your team came
Nine days of the quarter with zero overlap, what they had in common, and why the obvious remedy — find somebody — does not work.
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.
When office attendance becomes a proxy for performance, a team can find out more on the website and move the discussion back to projects, workload, and observable outcomes.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by McKinsey People and Organization.
Nine days of the thirty-four, none of the person's own team of nine was in the building. Not a thin day: none at all.
Five of those nine days the building was otherwise busy. That is the detail that makes the category confusing from the outside, because the day did not look empty. It was full of other people's teams.
What they had in common
- Seven of the nine were Mondays, Thursdays or Fridays. The thin end of the week, which is the same clustering seen from the other side.
- Five were chosen for reasons outside work — a delivery, a tradesman, a hospital appointment the following morning, a day when the usual day was impossible.
- None had anything in the calendar that involved a colleague. This was knowable in advance and was not checked, because there is no habit of checking.
- All nine were fully compliant. Every one counted towards the three.
Why "go and find people" does not work
The obvious remedy is social: walk the floor, sit somewhere busier, ask who is in.
It was tried. The problem is not shyness; it is that the value of an unscheduled conversation comes from it being with somebody whose work touches yours. A pleasant twenty minutes with a person from another department is a pleasant twenty minutes. It does not resolve the thing that was going round in writing, because they do not know anything about it.
Proximity to people is not the input. Proximity to the people is, and if they are forty miles away, no amount of initiative in the building changes it.
The thing that would have worked
Knowing, the evening before, that nobody would be in.
That is all. Not a policy change, not an exception, not a conversation with anybody. Just the information, which existed — nine people each knew their own plan — and which was never assembled anywhere.
With it, five of those nine days would have moved to a different weekday at no cost to anybody, and the two hours and ten minutes would have bought something on five more occasions.
Why the information does not get assembled
Because publishing where you will be feels like being tracked, and because the systems that could do it automatically are the same systems that count attendance, which means they arrive attached to enforcement.
That association is worth breaking deliberately, and the way to break it is to keep the thing small and voluntary and owned by the team: a line in a channel on Friday afternoon saying who expects to be in next week. No system, no reporting, no history. On this record it would have been the highest-value change available, and it costs nine messages a week.
The nine days
| Day | Weekday | Why it was chosen | Team present |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thursday | Default third day | 0 |
| 2 | Monday | Making up an illness day | 0 |
| 3 | Thursday | Delivery on the Wednesday | 0 |
| 4 | Friday | Only free day that week | 0 |
| 5 | Thursday | Default third day | 0 |
| 6 | Monday | Appointment the next morning | 0 |
| 7 | Tuesday | Displaced by a client visit | 0 |
| 8 | Thursday | Default third day | 0 |
| 9 | Tuesday | Displaced by a tradesman | 0 |
Four of the nine were the default third day — chosen once, in week one, and never revisited. That is the cheapest thing on this list to fix and the one that went unfixed longest, because a default is not experienced as a decision.
The information that would have prevented it
Nine people knew their own plans. Nobody knew anybody else's. The information was complete and entirely unassembled, which is an unusual kind of failure: not missing data, just unpooled data.
Five of the nine days would have moved. Two were fixed by circumstances outside work and would not have. The remaining two were the default day, which would have been changed permanently rather than day by day.
Why this one is worth acting on first
Of everything on this site, sharing plans is the only change that requires no agreement, no policy, no manager and no argument. One person can start it by posting their own week and asking who else is in, and it either catches on within a fortnight or it does not.
It is also reversible and leaves nothing behind, which matters: a habit that can be abandoned silently is much easier to begin than one that has been announced as an initiative.