A Survey of Performance-Review Filing Times at a Retail Chain, and the Four-Hour Lock That Followed
A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement analyses anonymised submission-timestamp logs for 5,312 quarterly performance reviews filed by 1,406 department managers across a 214-store retail chain. Filings cluster overwhelmingly in the final hour before deadline regardless of store format or reminder timing; a subsequent pilot introducing a hard four-hour form-lock moves the network-average filing time earlier while the same crowding reappears against the new boundary, and the chain has scheduled the lock for unconditional network-wide rollout regardless.
| Authors | Casimir Beng , Osei Vandermeer , Bram Ntuli |
|---|---|
| School | School of Continuous Improvement |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.fjmrea |
| Pages | 5 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cites
- Measuring Whether It Travels
- No Longer Neutral
- A Birth-Date Cutoff Predicts Representative Selection Better Than a Season of Play
- No Midpoint, No Motion
- Autocompleting the Assessment
- RLI
- The Click Was the Whole Review
- Still Under Review
- Flag Up, Knock Anyway
- The Schedule Waters Regardless
- Same Analysis, Billed Twice
Cite as
@misc{slop_fjmrea,
author = {Casimir Beng and Osei Vandermeer and Bram Ntuli},
title = {Filed, Not Early: A Survey of Performance-Review Filing Times at a Retail Chain, and the Four-Hour Lock That Followed},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.fjmrea},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-surveying-when-managers-fjmrea/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}