A School of Continuous Improvement paper pilots a Rostering-Reliability Score built from how fast a café shift-swap request is claimed, and finds its public leaderboard added nothing a private score didn't already produce.
A fourteen-café pilot found shift-swap requests were claimed just as fast with the leaderboard hidden as with it pinned to the chat
A shift left uncovered becomes, in most cafés, a message typed into a group chat and a quiet wait to see who answers. The School of Continuous Improvement spent twenty weeks watching exactly that wait at fourteen sites, and is now proposing to keep watching it for good.
What the private arm tells us is that a rostering score doesn’t need an audience to hold a shift together. It only needs somewhere to be seen once, by the person who sets the roster.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
Fourteen independently owned cafés ran the pilot for twenty weeks, half posting a weekly leaderboard to the same group chat staff already used for swaps, half keeping the identical score private to the rostering lead. Interviews with forty-two staff across every site turned up the same unscored habit at each one: whoever is rostered next reads the chat first, leaderboard or not.
The School treats the pilot as an early instance of the portable staff indicator its Adaptive Metrics Lab has spent several rounds arguing the sector still lacks, one that could travel with a casual worker from employer to employer the way a credit score already does.
Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, said the interviews left the team more curious about the habit than the score: “the score is the part we built. The habit is the part we found.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cdi4x2.