A School of Emergent Priorities paper interviews team leaders and staff across a national retail and logistics chain about a flexible-work platform's manager-override button, and finds override use collapsing once a quarterly efficiency score began tracking it.
A new interview study across 21 retail and logistics sites ties the fall directly to a quarterly efficiency score, not to fewer requests needing one
A button designed to sit outside a rostering platform’s rules is, on a new account from the School of Emergent Priorities, being pressed less than at any point since it was installed.
Led by Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, with Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, and Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints, the study interviews 34 team leaders and 51 shift staff across 21 sites of a national retail and logistics chain about the platform’s manager-override button, the feature that lets a team leader grant a flexible-work request the auto-approval rules would otherwise decline. Since an efficiency score folding override frequency into each team leader’s quarterly review became visible on dashboards, override use has fallen by roughly three-quarters and shows no sign of recovering, whether or not the score names a team leader publicly.
An override button only stays a safety valve for as long as nobody is reading the gauge. Once somebody is, people stop reaching for it, and they stop for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they needed it.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The School reads the result as continuous with its broader interest in how settled institutional behaviour survives the appearance of a choice still being offered. Dr Nwachukwu said Capability Sprints, which trains incoming team leaders for chains including the one studied here, has this year added a published override-discipline benchmark to its graduating assessment, and that the paper “gives that benchmark a reading the program did not go looking for.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.g717og.