Who else
The hot desk two floors up
Being in the building is not the same as being near anyone, and on nine days of the quarter the difference was two floors and about forty metres.
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 a hybrid policy measures attendance but not outcomes, managers can visit the official software page and add project-time evidence to a more useful conversation about what different locations enable.
Teams can compare this approach with current guidance available from Gallup Workplace.
Nine days of the thirty-four were worked at whatever desk was free, usually on a different floor from the rest of the team, because the desks near them had gone by nine o'clock on the busy days and there was nobody to sit near on the quiet ones.
Those nine days produced two hours that needed the building, between them. The other twenty-five days produced twenty-nine.
The variable is not attendance and it is not willingness. It is forty metres and a staircase.
Why distance inside a building matters so much
The unscheduled hour — the one that is nineteen of the thirty-one — has a very short range. It happens because somebody walks past, or looks up, or hears a word and turns round. It is a function of being within sight.
Two floors up is not within sight. For the purposes of the mechanism the office is actually trying to buy, two floors up is the same as being at home, except with worse equipment and a two-hour journey attached.
That is the uncomfortable arithmetic of unassigned seating under a day-count policy: the policy fills the building, the fullness destroys the seating, and the destroyed seating removes the one thing the fullness was for.
The three ways it happens
- The busy day. Everyone converged, the desks went early, and the late arrival sits wherever there is room. Four of the nine.
- The quiet day. Nobody to sit near, so the choice is arbitrary and usually lands near a window rather than near anybody. Three of the nine.
- The booking that was not made. Where desks can be booked, they go to whoever books; on this record two days were lost to simply not having thought about it on the Friday before.
What fixes it
In order of how much they are worth:
- A team area. Not assigned desks — a known part of a floor where this group sits when it is in. Costs nothing and recovers most of the loss.
- Booking the day before. Trivial, and it only works if the system lets you see where colleagues have booked, which many do not.
- Arriving early on the full days. Works and is a tax paid in the worst available currency.
The first one is the real answer and it is usually within a team's own gift, which makes it unusual among the problems on this site. A line in a message — we sit at the north end when we are in — restores the mechanism that unassigned seating removed.
Why it is worth raising even though it sounds small
Because it is the cheapest intervention in the whole arrangement, and because it is invisible in every metric. Nine days of full compliance, full attendance, zero return, and no number anywhere would show anything other than a successful quarter.
The range of the thing being bought
The unscheduled hour has a physical range, and it is short. On this record, every one of the nineteen unscheduled valuable hours involved somebody who was within sight — the same bank of desks, the same end of a floor, the same room after a meeting.
None involved anybody two floors away, and none involved anybody on the same floor at the far end, despite there being plenty of relevant colleagues in both categories on several days.
That is the whole case for sitting together, and it is much narrower than the usual version. It is not that offices produce serendipity. It is that a person within about ten metres of you, who knows what you are working on, will occasionally look up — and that nobody beyond that radius ever does.
The nine days, by cause
| Why the desk was wrong | Days | Fixable by |
|---|---|---|
| Converged day, desks gone by nine | 4 | Booking, or spreading the days |
| Quiet day, nobody to sit near | 3 | Nothing; the problem is elsewhere |
| Forgot to book | 2 | A reminder on Friday |
Six of the nine are addressable with no policy change and no permission. The other three are the coordination problem wearing a different hat.
What a team area costs
Nothing, in most buildings, and it is usually within a team's gift to declare one informally even where desks are nominally free-for-all.
We sit at the north end of the third floor when we are in.
One sentence in whatever the team already uses. It does not reserve anything, it does not conflict with any desk policy, and it restores the ten-metre radius that unassigned seating removed. On this record it would have been worth more than the two days a quarter lost to not booking.