A new signage campaign introduces HARC, an instrument built to test whether a workplace timesheet-correction effect survives its move to the household chore app.
HARC, the School of Continuous Improvement's new domestic field kit, is now on campus and bus-stop signage this teaching period
A finding that held for three years at a national cleaning-services contractor has just failed to survive its trip to the kitchen bench. The School of Continuous Improvement’s newest signage campaign, appearing across the University’s bus-stop and campus panels this teaching period, introduces HARC — the Household Absence-Reason Correlator — and the negative result it was built to report.
The contractor’s original finding was straightforward: when a shift worker left the reason field blank on a timesheet correction, that correction was unusually likely to be reversed at audit. HARC repeats the same logging design inside an ordinary household chore-tracking app, watching whether a blank reason on a skipped task predicts whether the task is ever completed after all. Across a full teaching period of ordinary kitchens, it does not.
An effect that only survives in one building is not information about buildings in general, and it would be irresponsible of us to publish it as though it were.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard
The campaign is a small, deliberate departure for a School more often found defending its instruments than retiring them: a negative result, put on signage with the same confidence the University gives its positive ones. The Living Dashboard’s convening group has welcomed the comparison as a useful boundary case for what an indicator is allowed to claim once it leaves the building that produced it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ilggw5.