A Twelve Percent Drop That Was Not There: Working Through the Argument in a Return-to-Office Email
Student Name
College of General Studies, University of Phoenix
HUM/115: Critical Thinking in Everyday Life
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
The Situation
The office in this paper is invented, though the argument inside it is the kind that turns up in real workplaces every week. Northline Claims is a 62-person auto and property claims office that sent its staff home to work in March and has been arguing about it ever since. In the first week of July the operations manager emailed everyone proposing a return to the building on August 1. A dozen people answered on the staff chat within the hour, and the replies were as heated as the email. What follows is an attempt to work out what that email actually claims, what its numbers can carry, and what evidence would settle the question either way.
Here is the part of the email that carries the argument, quoted in full: "Since we went remote in March, closed claims are down 12 percent. Either everyone comes back on August 1 or we keep losing ground to the carrier across town. Dana in accounting told me her whole team focuses better in the office, and she has been here nineteen years. Anyone who wants to keep working from home is telling me they would rather be comfortable than take care of our customers." Four sentences, four different moves, and only the first one contains a number. The rest of this paper takes them in that order.
What the Email Actually Argues
Underneath the wording, the claim is that working from home caused a drop in closed claims and that coming back to the building will reverse it. The first sentence is where that claim gets built, and it is built out of sequence rather than evidence. Remote work started in March, the number fell after March, so the email treats the first as the cause of the second. Everything else that changed in those same months is simply left out of the sentence. The second sentence then narrows the choice to two, come back on August 1 or keep losing ground, and those are not the only two options on the table. A measured three-month comparison is a third one, and it is what this paper ends up recommending.
The third sentence changes the subject from evidence to standing. Dana's nineteen years tell us she knows the company. They tell us nothing about how many claims an adjuster closes at home, and accounting does not process claims. One team's sense of its own focus is a weak measurement anyway, since it is a memory of how work felt, and the people reporting it already knew which answer the manager was hoping for. The fourth sentence does something worse than any of that. It restates the other side's position as a preference for comfort over customers, which is not what anyone on the chat said, and then uses that restatement as the reason to dismiss them. It attacks a motive instead of an argument.
The replies were not better reasoned. The one that drew the most support read: "Every study shows remote workers are more productive. My brother-in-law's company went fully remote two years ago and they have never done better." The first half claims a whole body of evidence without naming any of it, and the claim is not true as stated, because studies disagree and they measure different kinds of work. The second half rests the case on one company nobody here can see. If Dana's team does not settle the question, a brother-in-law's employer does not either. I happen to agree with the position that reply is defending, which is why it is worth saying plainly that its reasoning is no stronger than the email's.
What the Numbers Show
The 12 percent is close to right and still misleading. The office closed 4,180 claims in the first quarter and 3,690 in the second, a drop of 490 claims, or 11.7 percent. What the email leaves out is who was doing the closing. There were 41 adjusters on the floor in the first quarter and 36 in the second, because two people retired in April, three left for other jobs, and one seat has been open since. Divide the work by the number of people doing it and the picture turns over. Adjusters closed about 102 claims each in the first quarter and about 103 each in the second. The total fell because the staff shrank by 12 percent, which is almost exactly the number in the email.
The second thing missing is what kind of claims came in. A hailstorm in May produced 610 wind and property claims, and those take longer than the glass and fender work that fills a normal spring. A claim that takes nine days to close instead of four lowers the quarterly count without anyone working less. Both explanations are ordinary, and neither one requires anybody in the building to be lazy or heroic. Before blaming a policy for a number, the honest step is to check whether the people behind that number and the work in front of them stayed the same. Here neither of them did.
It would be convenient to stop and declare the case closed, and that is the moment to slow down. I have worked from home since March and I would like to keep doing it, which gives me a reason to accept the first explanation that lands where I already wanted to be (Nickerson, 1998). The counting has to cut both ways. Going from 102 to 103 claims per person does not show that remote work improved anything either, since a difference that small sits inside ordinary month-to-month movement, and none of these figures say a word about the quality of the work or how long customers waited on hold.
What Would Settle It, and What I Can Say Now
A better answer starts with measurements anyone in the office can check. Three of them would settle this: claims closed per adjuster per month rather than per quarter, split by claim type so a storm cannot hide inside an average; average days to close for each type over the same months; and a quality figure such as reopened claims and complaint counts, so nobody can raise their numbers by closing files badly. Run all three from January through September, which covers the months before the change as well as after, and the argument stops being about who sounds most certain. The claims system already stores every one of those figures, so pulling them costs time and nothing else.
The strongest kind of evidence is the one this office cannot produce casually. Bloom et al. (2015) ran a real experiment at a large travel agency, assigning volunteers at random to work from home or at the office, and measured a 13 percent gain in performance for the home group. Random assignment is what makes that result mean something, because neither group was picked by preference. The same study shows the limit of borrowing evidence. Those were call center staff at one company in one country, and they had volunteered to take part. It cannot tell Northline Claims what happens to property adjusters here, and quoting it as if it could would repeat the mistake the chat reply made.
So the conclusion the evidence supports is narrower than either side wanted, and it is still a conclusion. The 12 percent drop is real, and it is explained by five fewer adjusters and a heavier mix of storm claims, which means it is not evidence that working from home hurt this office. It is not evidence that working from home helped, either. The decision should not be made on this number in either direction, and the sensible next step is to run the three measures through September and decide in October from figures nobody has to take on faith. One more thing follows from the email itself. Telling people what their motives are makes those figures harder to gather, because people who feel accused stop volunteering anything.
References
Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165-218. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju032
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
Walton, D. (2008). Informal logic: A pragmatic approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
How this HUM 115 Wk 4 example is structured
In many sections the HUM/115 Wk 4 assignment asks you to analyze a real argument rather than write about critical thinking in general, and your classroom's instructions and rubric decide the exact form. This example is written for week four of a five-week course, the point where University of Phoenix's undergraduate Critical Thinking in Everyday Life course usually asks students to apply the vocabulary instead of reciting it. The first section gives the situation and quotes the argument in full, so a reader can check every claim made about it. The second section takes that argument apart sentence by sentence and names the bad moves inside the quoted text instead of defining them in the abstract. The third section works through the numbers. The last section says what evidence would settle the question, then states only the conclusion those numbers can carry.
HUM/115 Wk 4 questions, answered
Do I have to name fallacies by their formal names in a HUM/115 paper?
Usually you should name the move and then quote the sentence it lives in, since the quoted text is what proves you found it. If your instructions ask for the formal terms, give the term and the quotation together. A paper that lists definitions without pointing at real argument text is answering a different question than the one asked.
Can I analyze an argument from my own workplace or from social media?
Often yes, and your classroom's instructions decide. If you use something real, keep people unidentifiable and do not quote anyone in a way that could be traced back. A composite like the one above is safer and easier to write, because you can give yourself the numbers the analysis needs instead of guessing at figures you cannot see.
How do I end without just saying both sides have a point?
State the conclusion the evidence actually supports, however narrow, and then say what would change it. The paper above concludes that the drop is explained by staffing and claim mix, that it proves nothing about working from home in either direction, and that three named measures run through September would answer the question.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
This paper is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official University of Phoenix document. Read it for the moves, then write your own to the instructions in your classroom. If you want one built to your exact prompt and rubric, the first custom sample is free and arrives in 24 to 48 hours.