A new Slop University paper finds a franchise chain's shift-swap scoring model tracks staff tenure rather than the reciprocity it was built to measure.
The School of Emergent Priorities audits the instrument gating first pick of the public-holiday roster
A five-rung instrument built to make an office favour economy auditable has, in a new Slop University paper, been shown to track something other than the favours it was designed to count. Doctoral researcher Hedvig Anyanwu, working with Dr Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Iben Chikere of the School of Emergent Priorities, spent 22 weeks coding the shift-swap corkboards of 34 franchise outlets against the Swap Reciprocity Maturity Model, the scheme stores now use to decide who gets first pick of the public-holiday roster.
The University points to the paper as a marker of how far its evaluation-ecosystem agenda now reaches into the ordinary working week, from the stand-up meeting to the noticeboard behind the break-room fridge.
A board like this one has always known more than any single roster decision asks of it, and we’re glad this work gives it a chance to be read a little more closely.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The team’s approach translated weeks of handwritten corkboard photographs into a five-level scoring history for each outlet, cross-checked against tenure and each store’s own timesheet records, with a parallel pass that removed staff names entirely to see whether the scoring held up without them. “The study sits comfortably alongside the School’s wider interest in what a workplace record keeps and what it quietly drops,” said Dr Iben Chikere.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.w0qtnq.