A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement surveys library shelving casuals each fortnight on their odds of hitting a semester consistency bonus, and checks their answers against the roster system that actually decides who qualifies.
A fortnightly survey of library shelving casuals finds self-rated odds of the bonus barely move even after the roster breaks the streak it requires
Ask a Slop University Library shelving casual how their semester consistency bonus is tracking, and most will say: fine, so far. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement checked “so far” against the roster’s own record.
Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Sten Okwuosa surveyed 46 rostered shelving casuals across six library branches every fortnight of a teaching period, asking each for their own odds, out of 100, of reaching the bonus threshold, then matching every answer to the same shelver’s entry in the roster system’s shift-continuity log — the record that actually decides who qualifies. By the sixth fortnight, close to a third of shelvers whose own streak had already broken were still rating their odds at seventy or higher.
You don’t design an incentive to see how hard the roster can work against it. But that’s roughly what ours has been doing all semester.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Okwuosa, the poster’s second author, said the gap wasn’t really about shelvers misreading their own shifts. “Nobody tells them the streak broke,” he said. “The log updates itself, the roster keeps assigning the next fortnight, and the only way to know is to go and check your own record against the fine print, which almost nobody does until the bonus doesn’t arrive.”
The Library’s rostering team has asked to see the fortnight-by-fortnight breakdown before the next scheduling cycle opens. The eligibility rule tying the bonus to an unbroken streak is not currently under review.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.24hhzj.