Formalising the Group Chat

A Mixed-Methods Study of Café Shift-Swap Claim Latency

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement pilots a Rostering-Reliability Score, built from how quickly a café shift-swap request is claimed in a team messaging group, across fourteen sites and an embedded ablation splitting a public pinned leaderboard from an identically computed private score. Median claim latency fell from 45.4 to 33.0 minutes at twelve of fourteen sites, but the ablation found no detectable difference between the public and private arms, and interviews with forty-two staff attribute most of the reduction to a pre-existing informal claiming norm that predates the pilot.

@misc{slop_cdi4x2,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Solveig Adeyemi and Marit Osayande},
  title        = {Formalising the Group Chat: A Mixed-Methods Study of Café Shift-Swap Claim Latency},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.cdi4x2},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-how-fast-a-cdi4x2/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}