A School of Continuous Improvement paper reports that formalising an office coffee-shout roster into a rostered, logged, escalation-ladder instrument lifted completion rates across every staff tier over a 14-week deployment, with the smallest gain recorded for management.
A 42-person office's shout roster gains attendance logging, a memo ladder and a quarterly equity score, and completion rates rise across every tier, management included
A firm’s coffee roster used to run on memory and a sticky note. It now runs on a swipe log, a memo ladder, and a quarterly scorecard, and Slop University reports today that it works better than the office expected. A paper published by Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Dr Dagny Okafor and Dr Solveig Adeyemi followed a single 42-person office through the changeover, from an unwritten shout arrangement to a published roster with door-swipe attendance, a three-step reminder-to-memo escalation, and a quarterly review scoring each person’s shout debt. Completion against the roster rose for every tier measured over the fourteen-week deployment, junior staff’s rate climbing more than thirty points, and a smaller trial that quietly dropped one escalation step made no measurable difference to how quickly a case resolved. It is the kind of result the School of Continuous Improvement collects for the shelf marked evidence, rather than the one marked hope.
A roster works better once someone is watching it, and the interesting question is what else starts happening once someone is.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
“It’s a small office and a small roster,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, “but the questions it raises about what a score can carry outlast either one.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xg3vtx.