A School of Continuous Improvement poster reports a 14-week case study of a franchise outlet where the shift supervisor read the mandatory onboarding quiz aloud on eleven of twenty-two Friday shifts.
Eleven of twenty-two Friday onboardings at one franchise outlet had the shift supervisor supply the answers
A quiz that is always answered correctly is not always taken. A research poster published today by the School of Continuous Improvement reports a single franchise outlet where, on eleven of twenty-two new-hire onboardings observed over a Friday-rush quarter, the shift supervisor read the mandatory safety-and-service quiz aloud rather than hand the new hire the tablet.
Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter, led the work with Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints. The pair embedded with the outlet’s dinner shift, weighing the onboarding tablet’s own completion log against what the room actually did, and found the supervisor’s answer arriving before the new hire had finished reading the question on nine of those eleven sessions.
The tablet keeps a record of a pass. It has no field for who supplied the answer.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
The poster joins the School’s standing project of asking what a completed form actually attests to, and extends it from the office to the counter. “The case leaves a live question for every roster manager,” said Dr Nwachukwu, whose own research tracks what a Capability Sprint cohort still does once the certificate is filed, “at what headcount does a genuine attempt stop fitting the shift?”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.euosln.