A School of Emergent Priorities interview study traces how staff kept the tea-room's birthday roster running on memory, and the escalation clause the Common Rooms Working Group built once it noticed.
Interviews with 34 staff found an unofficial cover economy running the birthday morning-tea roster long before any policy caught up with it.
A name skipped on the tea-room’s birthday roster used to get quietly covered by whoever noticed first. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities asked 34 staff how that actually happens, and found a system running well ahead of the working group meant to be running it.
Dr Marek Solheim, working with Dr Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Iben Chikere, interviewed staff across three faculties about the fortnightly sign-up sheet pinned to the common room’s corkboard. Most described covering an uncredited turn at least once; fewer than one in five had ever told the Common Rooms Working Group a turn had been missed at all.
Staff had already solved the problem the roster was meant to solve. They just hadn’t told anyone they’d solved it.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
The Common Rooms Working Group has since closed the gap it didn’t know it had: two consecutive missed turns are now treated as a governance matter rather than an oversight, triggering an automatic reassignment and a note against the roster record.
“A roster that runs on memory is still a roster,” said Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities. “It just isn’t one the Working Group can see without asking.”
The Working Group reviews its first round of reassignments at its autumn sitting. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2vtkkn.