A School of Continuous Improvement Impact Report follows five years of interview fieldwork into TERM, the process that took a floor-coined word for a ratings meeting into a binding enterprise-agreement clause.
Five years of interview fieldwork culminate in TERM, the process that carried one break-room word into a state audit office's enterprise agreement.
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent five years building a small, unglamorous capability: listening properly to what its partner organisations’ own staff call the things that happen to them at work. Today the School published its Impact Report 2021–2026, and with it the clearest account yet of TERM, the terminology-review function that decides when a floor-coined word is ready to become policy.
The publication marks what the School considers its quietest achievement of the reporting period, and arguably its most binding. The report draws on interview fieldwork across dozens of partner sites — professional services floors, government service-delivery teams, and franchise retail networks — tracing the words staff independently reach for when the official vocabulary doesn’t quite fit. Where a term recurs, unprompted, across unconnected sites, TERM considers it for formal adoption; one such term now has its own reporting line in a partner organisation’s enterprise agreement.
The floor already had a word for what we were measuring. Our job was to notice.
— Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Dr Mirela Hanke, who contributed to the report’s fieldwork, said the program has changed how she reads a dashboard: “once you’ve heard the word a floor uses for a proxy, you don’t read the proxy the same way again.”
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.0tx2yy.