Put Something Through

A Semi-Structured Interview Study of Counter Work at 22 Branches Under Viability Review

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews 31 staff across 22 inland branches of one member-owned mutual banking network, each held on a viability schedule computed as counter transactions per opening hour, about the shifts they had most recently worked. Reflexive thematic analysis of the transcripts produced 81 codes and four themes, with the codebook stable from interview 24. Eighteen of 19 counter staff and 11 of 12 managers described a standing category of counter work that produces no posted transaction, and 84 per cent of counter staff against 42 per cent of managers described entering a nominal transaction so that an otherwise unrecorded visit would appear in the day's record, a practice participants framed as accuracy rather than adjustment. All 12 managers and regional coordinators identified the framework's own first remedy, a reduction in opening hours, as the point after which the score ceased to recover. Reanalysis under a second independently developed codebook moves the mean codes applied per transcript by 0.5 and leaves the four-theme structure intact.

@misc{slop_cr26mi,
  author       = {Dagny Okafor and Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Bram Ntuli and Torun Ezeigwe},
  title        = {Put Something Through: A Semi-Structured Interview Study of Counter Work at 22 Branches Under Viability Review},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.cr26mi},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-bank-branch-counter-cr26mi/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}