A Slop University brochure profiles a shift-quality instrument that banks the minutes a clock-in's rounding rule recovers and uses the running total to decide overtime priority.
The minutes a payroll system rounds away are banked, published, and read as a shift-quality score
A rounding rule most payroll systems treat as a housekeeping detail has, at Slop University, become the input to a published measure of who gets first pick of overtime.
The Adaptive Metrics Lab’s shift-quality ledger, described today in a new research-showcase brochure, banks the minutes a workplace’s clock-in rounding rule recovers from early arrivals and totals them into a running score, refreshed each fortnight and visible to whoever plans the next roster. The Lab pairs the ledger with the Horizon Register’s own use of the same data to forecast staffing pressure ahead of a roster cycle, and with the Capability Sprints program that trains practitioners to build comparable instruments inside their own organisations.
It’s a small ledger. Most of what the University measures started exactly that small.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, which supplies the ledger’s scoring conventions, called the instrument “a reminder that a workplace is already keeping records nobody has thought to read as evidence.”
The Adaptive Metrics Lab treats the result as confirmation of a working principle: an instrument’s usefulness rarely depends on how large the thing it measures actually is. The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pzwybp.