A new Slop University brochure showcases the Adaptive Metrics Lab's Reliability Grid, a four-cell instrument crossing performance-review scores against shift-swap requests that now sets the order in which staff choose their shifts each week.
A grid crossing performance-review scores against shift-swap requests now sets the order in which staff choose next week's roster, and the School of Continuous Improvement built it that way on purpose.
People assume a grid like this is about judging them. It is really about giving the roster a reason it can point to.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
That is how the School of Continuous Improvement describes the Reliability Grid, its newest instrument out of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, in a brochure published today. The Grid takes two numbers most workplaces already keep separately, a performance-review reliability score and a count of shift-swap requests, and crosses them into four named cells: Banked, Trusted, Watched, and Flagged. What is new is not the crossing. It is what a workplace does with it once the cells are named: Banked and Trusted staff choose their shifts first when the roster opens; Watched and Flagged staff choose from whatever is left.
The brochure treats the Grid as one entry in a longer ledger the School has been keeping for some time, setting it beside published findings from the Trajectory Analytics Group and five other lines of University research on the instruments an ordinary working week already produces.
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program, said the Grid was best understood as an admission rather than an invention. “A stand-up was never meant to be a data source,” she said. “Ours are, now, and the honest thing is to say so plainly rather than let it happen quietly.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sh5a0g.