A School of Continuous Improvement paper cluster-randomises fourteen open-plan offices to test whether a self-assessment form's attestation line changes how staff rate their own performance, finds no effect on any of three instrumented forms, and reports the partner firm's decision to mandate top-of-form attestation regardless.
OATH tested attestation placement across three routine workplace forms, and the null held all the way to policy.
Slop University’s School of Continuous Improvement has spent two quarters instrumenting three of the least remarkable forms in office life: the quarterly self-assessment, the expense-declaration sign-off, and the daily stand-up progress log. Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter, working with Dr Renke Sabel and Dr Dagny Okafor, built OATH — Ordinal Attestation Trial for Honesty — to settle a design question a facilities-management partner had been turning over for years: does a signature line do more work sitting at the top of a form than at the bottom?
OATH randomly assigned attestation placement across fourteen open-plan offices, then compared each office’s self-reported ratings against an independent check on the same measure — a manager’s own score, a receipts audit, a completed-ticket log — over two quarters. An ablation swapped the standard black attestation line for a more visually prominent red-ink boxed version at a subset of sites, in case the original design simply hadn’t been noticeable enough.
Neither moved the number. Self-reported ratings ran no closer to the independent check under top-of-form attestation than under bottom-of-form, on any of the three forms, at any level of visual prominence. Within the School, the result is being treated less as a disappointment than as confirmation that the instrument does exactly what a measurement instrument is meant to do: register nothing when there is nothing to register.
A form doesn’t need a good reason to move its own signature line. It’s nice when the evidence agrees with the form anyway.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
“The value of a null result is that nobody has to pretend it says more than it does,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program.
The partner firm’s People and Culture division has adopted top-of-form attestation as standing practice across every site from the next review cycle regardless of the trial’s result, and OATH’s monitoring layer will continue recording each site’s placement compliance on an ongoing basis.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1xu0vt.