A new Slop University brochure follows an open-plan office's do-not-disturb indicator lights into a desk-responsiveness index now cited at performance-review time, and invites partner organisations to bring their own workplace instruments into the fieldwork.
A new brochure follows an office indicator light into a performance-review template and profiles the fieldwork reading instruments like it nationwide
A small light clipped to a monitor stand, switched on to buy an hour’s uninterrupted work, is not built to survive contact with a performance review. A brochure published today by the School of Emergent Priorities follows one office floor’s fitting from that first quarter to its second: a facilities feed meant to justify keeping the light in stock, a line manager borrowing its numbers for a “collaboration and availability” field, and a review template revised so the field cannot be completed without it.
A signal built to protect one afternoon’s focus and a line in someone’s annual file are not the same kind of measurement, and we are interested in exactly the point where a workplace stops telling them apart.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The brochure sets that single-site case beside the University’s wider programme of fieldwork on workplace instruments — a rostering app’s fairness credit, an internal-transfer portal’s status field, a franchise’s onboarding tablet — each read for the point where a number built to describe something starts being trusted to decide it instead. Associate Professor Casimir Beng, who leads the School of Continuous Improvement’s Adaptive Metrics Lab, contributes a companion piece on how a measurement system spends the trust it earns the day it stops merely watching. Demo Quarter, convened by Dr Thandiwe Solberg, now runs a growing share of its sessions on instruments partner organisations bring in themselves, rather than ones built for the showcase.
Copies of the brochure, and the seven prior findings it draws together, are available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6h02iv.