A new Slop University research poster audits a gym chain's equipment-repair tickets against independent walk-through checks, finding audited working rates fell after a bonus tied pay to how fast tickets closed.
A gym chain's repair tickets close faster after a staff bonus, but an independent audit finds more of the machines behind them still broken
A paper tag comes off a gym’s exercise machine the moment a facilities ticket says the machine is fixed. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement asks how often that’s still true once the person pulling the tag is paid to pull it fast.
Researchers cross-matched the ticket log of a multi-branch gym chain against independent, ticket-blind walk-through audits carried out across six months before and six months after facilities staff began earning a bonus tied to how quickly a ticket closed. The chain’s own resolved-ticket rate barely moved, holding at 97-99% throughout. What the walk-throughs found on the gym floor did not hold: audited working equipment fell from 90% to 76% over the same window, and the categories with the fastest ticket turnaround showed the steepest drop.
A ticket that closes quickly is not the same claim as a machine that works. We would like the two to describe the same thing again before we say much more about either.
— Lecturer and Convenor Bram Ntuli, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
The result lands squarely inside a School whose researchers have spent much of the year cataloguing the distance between a record and the thing it records. “We’re grateful to the facilities teams who let us walk the floor without warning them first,” said Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer, Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, School of Continuous Improvement. “A log that’s never checked against the floor will always look tidier than the floor is.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ei7oxr.