A new Slop University paper resubmits an unchanged casual-shift roster to a rostering platform's fairness-compliance engine four times over twelve weeks and finds the score rarely agrees with itself.
Recomputing an unchanged casual-shift roster four times over twelve weeks turns up a different compliance verdict at 20 of 34 stores, and managers who stopped checking once they had a number
A fairness-compliance score is meant to be the last word on whether a week’s roster treated its casual staff evenly. A new Slop University paper resubmits the exact same roster to the scoring engine four times over twelve weeks and finds the last word keeps changing.
For the School of Continuous Improvement, the result lands less as a surprise than as confirmation of a suspicion the School has been circling for a while: that a compliance score’s authority and its accuracy are not the same achievement.
We’ve learned, again, that the School is better at building instruments that satisfy an audit than instruments that survive being asked twice.
— Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
“Once a manager has a number, the roster underneath it stops being anyone’s job to reread,” said Lecturer Marit Osayande, Convenor of the Living Dashboard. “What we don’t yet know is what would make someone look again.”
The team worked with a regional retail-and-hospitality group operating three dozen stores, taking one week’s already-finalised roster and putting it back through the rostering platform’s compliance engine at intervals across a school term, before asking the managers who had received each week’s verdict what they had done with it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.o8swbm.