About this collection
Not the Same Question is a collection of fifty notes about the return-to-office argument, built on one organisation's consultation sorted claim by claim.
What it is
Over eleven weeks, every claim made for or against a proposed three-day requirement was written down in the words it was said in. Twenty-four of them, from a proposal document, two all-hands sessions, a written consultation with ninety-six responses and three team meetings. Each was then sorted by what kind of claim it is, and recorded against what it was answered with.
Every figure quoted anywhere on this site comes from those twenty-four claims.
What it is not
It is not research. A single consultation is a single case, and no part of it predicts how yours ran or will run.
It is not a position on how many days anybody should work in an office. That question contains claims of all three kinds, and the argument of this site is that such a question is not the sort of thing a website settles.
It is not a method for showing that one side argues badly. On this record both sides made claims of every kind, both reached for evidence beyond what it could support, and both answered the other in the wrong kind at about the same rate.
And nothing here is employment advice. What an employer may require, what a consultation obliges and how a working arrangement may be varied are matters of local law and of individual contracts, both of which move. The pages that touch on it say so and point you to somebody qualified where you are.
Anonymity
Nobody is named here — no individual, employer, workplace, industry or place, and none will be. Individuals in the record carry a letter or a role. Identifying detail was dropped rather than disguised, because a disguise can be seen through and an omission cannot.
Corrections
One person did the sorting, and two of the twenty-four could reasonably have gone in a different column; both are marked where they appear. Mistakes elsewhere are worth hearing about. The arithmetic is meant to be checkable: each panel works out its own totals from the rows it displays, and any row it declines to draw is accounted for in the caption underneath, with the reason.