A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities sorts a plumbing-supplies depot's weekly timesheets by the roundness and lateness of their hours, and the depot has adopted the sort as its first read of overtime.
Overtime entered in odd hours on the day worked is now paid without query, and the payroll week closes at two minutes past five
At the close of each working week, a plumbing-supplies depot now asks two things of every timesheet before it asks anything else: whether the hours are round, and whether they were written down on the day. Odd Is Honest, a new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, gives the four resulting cells their names, and the depot’s payroll office has taken the sort up as its standing first read.
A working week leaves its marks on the paper it is written on, and we were glad to be shown how to read them.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The poster follows 38 staff across 24 weeks and 912 weekly timesheets, placing each one in a cell before any question of pay was raised. Under the depot’s new rule, overtime from the cell of odd hours entered on the day is paid without query or cap, while round entries are returned for resubmission. The payroll calendar has been set to match. Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, is a co-author, and Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the study “shows how much a payroll office can learn from paper it was already handling, and we are pleased to have it in the record.”
The School regards the poster as a considered contribution to the way a small workplace reads its own week, and expects the sort to settle into the depot’s routines in due course.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1laqem.