The costs
Whose journey is shortest
The people who set the rule had the shortest journeys on the team. That is not a motive. It is a vantage point, and vantage points are correctable.
Claims this part is about, and what each was answered with
The travel time and fares fall entirely on the employee
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudChildcare was arranged around the pattern now being changed
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudTwo people moved house on the basis of the previous arrangement
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudThe journeys of the people setting the rule are the shortest on the team
Interest·Nothing; it was never said out loudThe lease runs to 2031 and the rent review falls next year
Interest→A statement about who paysSaid once, in a finance update
five claims · five interest · none of the answered ones was answered in the wrong kind · four were never answered at all
All five claims about who pays, from the twenty-four.
On this record the people who wrote the three-day requirement had, between them, the three shortest journeys on the team.
This is the most delicate observation on the site and the easiest to turn into an accusation it does not support. It is worth handling carefully, because the careless version is both unfair and useless.
What it is not
It is not a motive. Nobody set a policy in order to make other people travel. There is no version of the record where anybody benefits from somebody else's commute.
It is not hypocrisy. They complied with their own rule, in full, and some of them exceeded it.
It is not unusual. Senior people in most organisations live closer to the office, for ordinary reasons involving pay and housing. The correlation is not a scandal; it is arithmetic.
What it is
A vantage point.
A rule that costs you twenty minutes a day is experienced as a modest adjustment. The same rule costing somebody else three hours a day is a different object, and there is nothing in the first experience that produces the second. Imagination does not reliably bridge a factor of five.
So the people deciding were not indifferent to the cost. They had a small and accurate sample of it, and no reason to suspect the sample was unrepresentative.
Why nobody corrected it
Because correcting it requires somebody to say "your journey is shorter than mine", which sounds like an accusation whichever way it is phrased.
The person with the long journey will not say it: from their position it is a complaint about a colleague. The person with the short journey will not say it: from theirs it is an admission that they are not qualified to decide, which is not true and which they are not going to volunteer.
So the vantage point stays uncorrected, not through anybody's choice but because neither party can raise it without cost.
The correction
One question, asked by the person with the shortest journey, giving their own figure first.
Mine is twenty-five minutes door to door, so this is cheap for me. What is everybody else's? I would rather know before we decide than after.
Two sentences. The first disarms the whole thing by conceding the position in advance; the second asks for the information. Nobody is accused, nothing is conceded about the policy, and the room now contains a range instead of one person's sample.
What it would have changed here
Not necessarily the number of days. Probably the shape: the range on this team ran from eighteen minutes to an hour and twenty-five, and a rule designed in the knowledge of that is a different rule from one designed without it — with notice periods, with a view about which days, with some acknowledgement that it is not the same ask of everybody.
The decision was made four times across eleven weeks and the question was never asked once.
The same vantage point in other decisions
This is not special to working location, which is worth saying because it makes the observation less accusatory and more useful.
Any rule costs its authors something, and what it costs them is the sample they have. Deadlines are set by people whose own work is different. Travel policies are written by people who travel differently. Tooling decisions are made by people with the newest machines.
None of that is corruption. It is the ordinary epistemics of deciding for people whose circumstances you do not share, and the correction is always the same: ask for the range before deciding, and give your own figure first.
Why giving your own figure first is the whole trick
Without it, the question is an audit. "How long is everybody's journey?" from somebody who has not said their own reads as information-gathering for a purpose nobody has explained.
With it, the question is a disclosure that invites reciprocity, and it establishes the one fact that makes the answers safe to give: that the asker already knows their own position is the easy one.
Five extra words, and they decide whether anybody answers honestly.
The other vantage point in this record
The correction runs both ways, and the second instance is less comfortable for the side this page has been examining.
The people arguing hardest against the requirement were, with one exception, the people furthest away. That is not a motive either and it is the same kind of fact: a rule that costs you eight hours a week looks different from one that costs you two, and nothing in the first experience produces the second.
Which means that the flexibility case on this record was also being made from a sample, and its proponents had no better view of the whole range than the people writing the rule did.
What a complete view would have required
Both ranges on one page, produced once, by somebody, early.
Journeys from eighteen minutes to an hour and twenty-five. Costs on the organisation, stated. Who finds which days impossible, asked privately.
None of that is difficult or expensive, and the whole of it fits on a side of paper. On this record it was never assembled, and each side argued from the end of the distribution it could see.