# Shift-handover confidence dial tracks the door, not the outcome, study finds

> A new Slop University paper moves a produce-judging confidence effect into a contact centre's shift handover, and finds the rating tracks how fast its rater clocks out rather than what the next shift finds.

A confidence rating a produce-judging study once found predictive has returned a very different result on its first move off the show circuit. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities asked whether the same instrument, filled in by contact-centre shift leads at the end of every shift, would predict what the next shift found — and reports that it does not.

Forty-six shift leads at one contact centre completed a confidence dial alongside every handover note for eight months, rating how sure they were that a flagged issue would still be open when a matching shift next came around. Against the next shift's own record, the rating showed no relationship at all — though it tracked, closely, how many minutes elapsed before its rater clocked out.

> A number that tracks the door isn't wrong so much as answering a question nobody asked it.
>
> — Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

"The certification result was already moving before we had anything to report," said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. "What the paper offers is a description of what the number was doing in the meantime." The contact centre's own certification rule, which ties shift-lead renewal to the same rating, remains in force.

The finding sits inside the School's continuing interest in how a method travels once it leaves the setting that first validated it.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.uxy5os.