A School of Continuous Improvement interview study of 41 franchise staff finds shift swaps are arranged in the team group chat well before they reach the roster app, and traces what changes once a re-logging mandate ties pay to the app's copy alone.
A School of Continuous Improvement interview study finds the group chat, not the roster app, is where shift swaps actually get arranged
Two workers can swap a Saturday shift in the time it takes to type “you good for Sat?” in the team group chat; the same swap can take the roster app most of a week to show as approved. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, led by Dr Torun Ezeigwe, interviewed 41 casual and part-time staff across nine sites of a franchise retail-and-hospitality chain about how a shift swap is actually agreed, then returned fourteen weeks later to ask the same questions once the chain’s new swap-of-record mandate had taken effect.
Staff describe the chat, not the app, as where the real negotiation happens — speed, a running sense of who owes whom, and a manager who never sees the first ask. Interviewed again after the mandate, the same staff report the chat is still doing that work; the app entry now follows as a second, separate step. The chain’s own swap-of-record log tells a different story, climbing from roughly a twelfth of logged changes to nearly all of them over the same fourteen weeks.
Staff already knew where the swap happened. Our job was to write it down without pretending we’d invented it.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement, School of Continuous Improvement
The School of Continuous Improvement treats a finding like this one — modest, inconvenient, and now binding — as exactly the kind of result its research programme exists to produce. From 1 October, the chain will count only a swap re-logged in the app toward either party’s shift-swap pay, whether or not the chat was what actually arranged it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sowvz2.