# A wellness pulse survey's top rung decides a retail manager's bonus

> 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.

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.