A School of Continuous Improvement interview study finds a performance-review platform's autocomplete field steering what managers write about their staff, and two partner employers turning resemblance to the suggestion into a submission requirement.
A six-site interview study finds managers accepting a performance-review platform's suggested phrasing well above the vendor's benchmark, with two employers now requiring reviews to resemble it before they count as filed
A manager reading their own review back to an interviewer, mid-sentence, could not always say whether the words in front of them were theirs. A new Slop University interview study, conducted across six partner workplaces, finds this uncertainty common, mild, and increasingly beside the point.
The study followed forty-four managers and sixty-one direct reports across retail, logistics, contact-centre, professional-services, and shared-services sites as each read their own finished review aloud, tracing in participants’ own words which lines they recognised as theirs and which belonged to the platform’s phrase-bank suggestion field. A parallel look at the platform’s own usage figures, including an unplanned nine-day outage that briefly removed the suggestion altogether, is reported alongside the interviews. The findings are emblematic of the School of Continuous Improvement’s wider project: tracing what an instrument becomes once an institution stops asking who is really doing the judging.
What we heard from managers wasn’t reluctance. It was relief, and we think that’s the more interesting finding to sit with.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, welcomed the finding as “a useful reminder that a submission gate is still a policy choice, whatever it happens to be gated on.” Two of the six partner organisations have already acted on the study’s internal figures, adopting the platform’s own divergence score as a condition of submission: a review whose free text departs too far from the phrase bank is returned to its author marked incomplete, regardless of what it says.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bxlsew.