A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits nine shared postdoctoral offices' door nameplates against the weekly hot-desk roster, finding a stale tab behind most of the semester's misdirected mail, parcels, and visitors.
A 14-week audit of nine shared offices finds a stale nameplate behind most of the semester's misdirected mail and visitors
We came into this expecting a labelling problem. What we found looks more like a small, well-mannered turf war.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
Nine shared postdoctoral offices in the School of Continuous Improvement’s building run on a weekly hot-desk booking calendar, with each desk’s occupant announced locally by a sliding-tab nameplate beside the door. A new paper from the School checked whether the two records agree, and audited every misdirected letter, parcel, and visitor that turned up when they didn’t.
Dr Okwuosa and Dr Bram Ntuli tracked all 36 desks across the nine offices every Monday morning for a full teaching semester, cross-checking each tab against that week’s booking and logging the front office’s tally of redirected mail and confused drop-ins. The tab matched the booking calendar in 71 per cent of the 504 desk-weeks audited; the remaining stale desk-weeks, despite being under a third of the sample, accounted for close to three-quarters of the semester’s misdirected deliveries and visitors. Occupants with a senior title left their name on the door for a working week or more after handing back the desk, against a single day for postdoctoral fellows — and a laminated reminder card posted for the semester’s second half changed almost nothing.
“A booking calendar assumes the desk agrees with it,” said Dr Petra Umbile, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a reasonable assumption right up until someone doesn’t feel finished with a desk yet.”
The School says the finding will feed directly into its indicator-currency work, with an automated, calendar-linked tab now under discussion as a successor to the laminated card.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8dleq5.