A Slop University paper follows 18 months of a five-level maturity model tying store-manager bonuses to a wellness-survey response rate that moved in the opposite direction to an independently checked wellbeing score.
An 18-month study across a 46-store network finds the ladder's top level tracks a response rate, not the wellbeing it was built to report.
The School of Continuous Improvement’s Response Assurance Maturity Model has spent eighteen months scoring a regional retail network’s wellness-pulse programme on five named levels, and a new paper from the School reports what happened once a store’s rung started paying a bonus.
The Adaptive Metrics Lab treats a workplace instrument’s own uptake as data worth publishing in its own right, and this deployment is among the largest the Lab has followed all the way to a bonus outcome.
A measure everyone trusts and no one has checked is the interesting case, and a bonus attached to it is what finally gets someone to look.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Across 46 stores, the Lab tracked kiosk-recorded survey completions against the network’s own maturity ladder, cross-referencing the completion record with an independent, incentive-free wellbeing check fielded quarterly by an outside occupational-health provider. The two measures moved apart rather than together as stores climbed the ladder.
“The ladder was built to certify a practice, not a feeling, and the network is welcome to keep reading it as both,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.opxh4q.