A Slop University research poster sorts workplace scheduling-poll replies into four voter types and reports a rostering tool auto-assigning the least popular shift by type, with no appeal path.
A nine-month study across 96 workplace group chats sorts scheduling-poll replies into four types, and one rostering tool has started assigning the least popular shift by type, with no appeal.
A three-option scheduling poll in a work group chat turns out to carry more information than yes, maybe, or no. A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities sorts nine months of poll replies across ninety-six workplace group chats into four recurring types, and reports one participating rostering tool now using the classification to decide who works the week’s worst shift.
The work is led by Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey, with doctoral candidate Sunniva Balogun, both of the School of Emergent Priorities. Reply timing and reversal behaviour across the sampled chats resolve into the same four types wherever the group looked — Instant Yes, Maybe-Lurker, Vote-then-Reverse, and Ghost — and the pattern predicts a roster’s outcome more reliably than anyone’s stated availability, a finding the School reads as further evidence for its running account of the gap between what an institution asks and what it actually ends up measuring.
It turns out a reply pattern says more about a person than the reply itself does. That is, in miniature, what the Strategic Drift Survey has always tried to measure at scale.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
“Sorting something into kinds is the easy part,” said doctoral candidate Sunniva Balogun. “What a workplace does with the sorting afterwards is the part nobody warns you about.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fhdpig.