A new Slop University paper reports that an activity-tracking maturity model's link to workplace recognition, strong in the call centre it was built for, disappears once the same instrument is redeployed across a professional-services firm's open-plan floors.
A School of Continuous Improvement replication finds a maturity model that predicted call-centre commendations shows no relationship with recognition across twenty-two open-plan floors
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent several years defending a particular claim about its call-centre activity-tracking maturity model: that however invasive the instrument, it earns its keep by predicting which floors get formally recognised. A new paper, published today, tests whether that claim survives outside the call centre altogether — and reports that it does not.
Dr Dagny Okafor led a team redeploying the identical four-stage instrument across twenty-two open-plan floors of a professional-services firm, trading each call-centre proxy for its office equivalent — a sign-in sheet, a badge-swipe log, a calendar audit, a continuous idle-seconds score feeding the floor’s daily stand-up bot. The instrument transferred without adjustment. The relationship it was known for did not: floors scored at every stage recognised colleagues at statistically indistinguishable rates.
An instrument’s paperwork can move to a new floor overnight. What it was actually measuring somewhere else doesn’t always come with it, and this is the clearest case we’ve built of that gap yet.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
Co-author Dr Fenna Okoro, of the School of Emergent Priorities, called the result “a useful correction to how quickly a validated instrument gets read as portable capability rather than a finding tied to where it was found.”
The School reads the null result as exactly the kind of check its own instruments should more often receive before travelling further than the room they were built in.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jsfbv7.