A new Slop University paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a single café franchise outlet where three lateness flags of ninety seconds or more within a fortnight trigger automatic enrolment in a written improvement plan, with no manager override recorded in eighteen months.
Three late clock-ins in a fortnight now enrol a barista in a written improvement plan, a new Slop University case study reports, and the tolerance has only ever tightened
Three shifts clocked in ninety seconds or more late, inside the same rostered fortnight, is now enough to enrol a barista in a written improvement plan at one outlet of a suburban café franchise, with no manager able to wave it through instead. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement follows the rule from its introduction to its present setting, across four successive tightenings of the tolerance it runs on.
The paper, led by Dr Thandiwe Solberg with Associate Professor Casimir Beng and Dr Joost Nwosu, reads eighteen months of badge-clock timestamps, shift rosters, and improvement-plan records against a matched outlet that kept its supervisor’s discretion in place. The University reads the case as the kind of close, unglamorous measurement its Master of Applied Measurement is built to produce.
A rule that only ever tightens is telling you something about who wrote it, not just who it’s timing. That’s the part we wanted a classroom to sit with.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
The paper also reports something the tolerance window was never built to notice: once staff learned where the line sat, clock-ins began arriving in a cluster just inside it, rather than any earlier. Associate Professor Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, called the pattern “the kind of thing a threshold produces whether or not anyone meant it to.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hr3yre.