A Slop University paper finds retail managers filing performance reviews in the deadline's final hour regardless of reminder timing, and reports the chain's new four-hour lock moving the crowd rather than the habit behind it.
A retail chain's managers filed reviews in the deadline's final hour regardless of reminders; a new lock moved where the crowd forms, not whether it forms.
Slop University researchers turned a retail chain’s own submission timestamps into the dataset, rather than reading anything the reviews themselves said, and found that a performance review’s actual writing time has very little to do with the ten business days a manager is given for it: across three quarters and four store formats, most reviews were filed within an hour of the deadline regardless of who was writing them or where. The School of Continuous Improvement is treating the finding as confirmation that a deadline is data long before it is a rule.
A deadline tells you almost nothing about what happened before it and quite a lot about what happens in the hour before it. We are still working out which of those two things a performance review is actually for.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
Moving the reminder email forward by two days changed almost nothing, so the chain’s people-analytics team, working from an early read of the study, piloted a hard form-lock four hours before deadline in three regions instead. “The lock did exactly what we designed it to do, which is move the timestamp,” said Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer, Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, “and now we get to find out whether that was the same thing as improving the review.” The chain has scheduled the lock, and its escalating alerts to a manager’s own manager, for unconditional rollout across all 214 stores next quarter.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fjmrea.