A new School of Continuous Improvement instrument sorts shift workers' self-reported alertness into three clusters and reassigns anyone whose report doesn't match their rostered block.
A pre-shift alertness survey across six franchise sites resorts staff into three clusters, not one fatigue curve
Roster software at six partner franchise sites has scheduled morning, afternoon, and night blocks against a single assumed fatigue curve for as long as anyone can remember. The School of Continuous Improvement has now put a number on how well that curve fits the people filling the blocks, and the answer is: unevenly. ALERT, a five-item pre-shift self-report instrument built by Sten Okwuosa and Dagny Okafor, sorts 214 shift workers’ responses into three alertness clusters and reassigns anyone whose report lands against the block they’re rostered to.
Where the old approach scheduled to a single average, ALERT lets each shift cycle’s self-reports describe their own shape and keeps the roster answerable to whatever shape comes back, refreshing cluster membership weekly across three eight-week cycles. The release reflects the School’s ongoing case for measuring a workplace on the terms its own people report, rather than the terms a schedule was built to expect.
A roster built for one curve was always going to meet a workforce shaped like three. ALERT is our first attempt to let the roster answer to whichever shape turns up.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
“Every self-report instrument eventually has to ask what it’s actually measuring,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation. “ALERT’s next cycle is designed to keep asking.”
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.i7cyy4.