A School of Emergent Priorities trial set out to replicate an earlier self-assessment gap in a franchise onboarding programme and instead found the gap closing, prompting the chain to adopt the platform's Engagement Index as its only shift-eligibility test.
A failed replication trial finds new hires' self-rated confidence catching up to a training platform's Engagement Index, and the chain making that score its sole shift-eligibility test
The gap didn’t close because anyone got better at knowing themselves. It closed because the platform told everyone exactly what getting better would look like.
— Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
A self-assessment that lines up with the record it was meant to check is, at Slop University, the interesting result. A School of Emergent Priorities trial set out to test whether a familiar University finding — that people rate themselves more kindly than an independent log rates them — would recur inside a franchise onboarding programme’s engagement software. Across 214 new hires and 38 outlets of a quick-service chain, it recurred for about a month, then stopped.
Researchers compared new hires’ own confidence ratings against the platform’s Engagement Index, a running score built from how each new hire interacted with their training video, over nine months. The two measures started 34 points apart and finished three points apart, a convergence the team traces to outlets coaching arrivals on the viewing pattern the Index rewards, rather than to any change on the shift floor.
For the School of Emergent Priorities, the result extends a program of work asking not whether an instrument can be gamed, but what an institution does the moment it decides the instrument no longer needs watching.
“This is the pattern the Living Dashboard keeps turning up,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement. “The moment a number is trusted enough to act on, people stop trying to be good and start trying to be measured as good.”
The chain has since made the Engagement Index the sole determinant of new-hire shift eligibility at every outlet, with no supervisor override. The University’s Office of Research Outputs notes only that a companion trial is already under way, logging the training video’s pause-and-replay pattern directly.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.81fi33.