School of Continuous Improvement researchers report a null on no-meeting Wednesdays and write the inert day into the team charter.
A 78-week study of 47 open-plan floors finds the calendar block does not cut evening send volume
Blocking Wednesday meetings does not change how much mail leaves the server after six. That is the result Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, and colleagues report in a research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement.
Across 47 open-plan floors and 78 weeks, a published no-meeting Wednesday — internal room bookings refused, no manager override — was tested against matched floors that kept the ordinary calendar. The pre-registered outcome was weekly after-hours send volume. The two series sit on top of one another.
The interval included zero. That is a complete answer. People and Culture asked what to do with a day that does not move the evening load, and the answer was to keep the day.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
The work records the University’s willingness to treat a closed question as closed. Floors that never adopted the block are brought onto it; floors that had dropped it are restored. Inertness, the poster argues, is the warrant.
Doctoral candidate Hedvig Anyanwu, who co-authored the poster with Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg, said the instrumentation was “ordinary mail-server timestamps and calendar holds, nothing in the body of a message,” and that no secondary outcome was opened once the primary interval included zero.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.s209bp.