What Presence Measures
Days in the office is the number most organisations know best. It is worth being precise about what it establishes.
What it genuinely tells you
Who was where, for scheduling. Room capacity, catering, security, coordination of overlapping teams. Real operational value and nobody disputes it.
Whether a policy is being followed. If a policy exists, compliance with it is a fact.
And patterns worth a question. Somebody whose attendance changes sharply is worth asking about — not because attendance matters, but because change is a signal about something else.
What it does not tell you
Whether work happened.
A Stanford study published in Nature found no productivity drop under hybrid working, alongside a 33% reduction in turnover. (Peer-reviewed.)
Gallup reports remote workers logging roughly one hour less per day with macro productivity steady. (Survey organisation.) Fewer hours, same output — which means hours were never the thing being purchased.
And 85% of business leaders report difficulty trusting that remote employees are productive, (vendor compilation), which is a fact about leaders rather than about employees, and it is the reason presence data keeps being collected.
The mandate evidence
Composition matters more than the rate. People with the most options leave first, which means the 14% is not a random 14%.
And the replacement cost is 50–200% of salary per person (SHRM), applied disproportionately to expensive roles.
Run that arithmetic on your own headcount before deciding a mandate is free.
Why it persists anyway
Because it is the only workforce number many organisations have that updates automatically.
Because visibility feels like control, and a manager who can see people has a sensation the data does not support.
And because the alternative requires judgement. Assessing whether work is good is a management act; counting who was present is not. What changes when nobody is present is a separate question.
What to measure instead
Output at whatever granularity your work has. Shipped, closed, delivered, resolved.
Whether commitments are met, which is the closest available proxy for reliability and does not require anybody to be seen.
And turnover grouped by manager, which predicts far more than attendance and takes an afternoon a year.
Keep the attendance data. Use it for the room booking, not for the performance review.
The short version
- Presence genuinely tells you who was where for scheduling, whether a policy is followed, and when a pattern changes sharply
- It does not tell you whether work happened: a Nature study found no productivity drop under hybrid work and 33% lower turnover
- Gallup finds remote workers log about an hour less per day with steady macro productivity — hours were never what was purchased
- 85% of leaders struggle to trust remote productivity, which is a fact about leaders and the reason the data keeps being collected
- Strict mandates carry roughly 14% higher attrition concentrated among people with the most options, at 50–200% of salary each
- Keep attendance data for room bookings and use output, met commitments and turnover by manager for anything else
For additional context on this topic, see Amateur Photographer.