A new Slop University paper from the School of Continuous Improvement finds a retail chain's neutral survey responses cluster suspiciously just under the threshold that decides a branch's eligibility for the chain's next expansion round.
A four-wave analysis of a retail chain's staff-sentiment survey links branch eligibility to how often employees choose the scale's middle option, and finds the option grows rarer exactly where scarcity pays.
A paper published today by researchers affiliated with the School of Continuous Improvement’s Living Dashboard programme examines four years of a retail chain’s staff sentiment survey, and finds that the scale’s own neutral option grows scarce in exactly the branches, and exactly the questions, where scarcity is rewarded. The finding extends the University’s habit of taking a workplace instrument at its word and following the number wherever the branches follow it first.
Researchers compared branch-level responses across the survey’s four completed rounds, tracking the share of answers landing on the scale’s middle option rather than any single item’s average. The share held broadly steady across the first three rounds; in the round after a public threshold was announced, it fell sharply among branches that would otherwise have sat just above the line the threshold drew.
A survey only has a middle option because somebody decided indifference was worth a box of its own. What we’ve shown is that the box stays empty exactly where emptying it pays.
— Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the finding sits comfortably alongside the Lab’s wider interest in what a workplace does with a number once the number starts deciding things for it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2qa6t0.