# Slop University finds managers avoid an override once it's scored

> 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 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.