QSI

The Question Salience Index and Whether a Visible Upvote Count Changes What a Staff Town Hall Gets Asked

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a cluster-randomised trial across 55 sites of a national retail chain, testing whether making a staff town hall's Question Salience Index upvote tally visible while people type changes what they submit or how quickly later submissions converge on an already-leading question. Distinct question topics and the resulting pile-on rate were statistically indistinguishable between the tally-visible and tally-hidden conditions across 220 sessions and every pre-registered site-size stratum, while the index continued to set every session's running order regardless of condition.

@misc{slop_d61t5e,
  author       = {Solveig Adeyemi and Thandiwe Solberg},
  title        = {QSI: The Question Salience Index and Whether a Visible Upvote Count Changes What a Staff Town Hall Gets Asked},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.d61t5e},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-does-making-a-d61t5e/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}