RLI

The Reflective Language Index and What Shift Managers Say Actually Happens in a Recorded Performance Review

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews 42 shift managers and team members across nineteen stores of a national retail and quick-service franchise about a five-month-old instrument that scores performance-review conversations for eleven prescribed coaching phrases. Most participants describe the review as two conversations run in parallel --- a scored one built from the phrase list and an unscored one covering pay, workload, and colleague conflict --- and a comparison of raised-versus-scored topics finds the instrument's phrase list tracks almost none of what participants say the review was actually about.

@misc{slop_usabhn,
  author       = {Bram Ntuli and Casimir Beng and Petra Umbile},
  title        = {RLI: The Reflective Language Index and What Shift Managers Say Actually Happens in a Recorded Performance Review},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.usabhn},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-franchise-retail-usabhn/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}