A new Slop University research poster matches signed-off retail-chain performance reviews against supervisors' own self-assessment scores and an independently logged record, finding the sign-off tracks the self-assessment far more closely than the record it was meant to check.
An audit of 1,240 retail-chain performance reviews finds managers' sign-offs track supervisors' own self-assessments far more than the till-accuracy and roster-reliability record kept to check them.
The School of Continuous Improvement’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda keeps returning to the same quiet substitution: the record built to check a claim gets filed away, and the claim ends up checking itself instead. A new Slop University research poster finds the pattern inside an ordinary piece of retail paperwork, the shift-supervisor performance review.
Dr Dagny Okafor and Dr Joost Nwosu matched 1,240 signed-off supervisor reviews across 68 stores of a retail chain against two things: the self-assessment score a supervisor wrote before their meeting, and a composite record score built from the store’s own till-accuracy and roster-reliability logs. The signed-off rating tracked the self-assessment closely. It barely tracked the record, and the gap between the two widened the longer a supervisor had held the role.
A form and a record can measure the same thing and still disagree, and a signature only ever checks the one somebody hands you first.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
Dr Joost Nwosu said the team now wants to trial a mandatory glance at the record before sign-off, “to see whether the gap narrows, or whether a manager just finds a different way to arrive at the same number.”
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2p4hjg.