Approval Fatigue: When Reviewers Stop Reading

Suppose a large store is piloting Desk, and an employee reviews every refund that Desk proposes. There are 300 requests in an 8-hour shift, one every 96 seconds. Suppose also that 98 percent of the proposals are correct, so 294 are right and 6 are wrong.

A wrong proposal appears about once in every 50 requests, or once every 80 minutes (50 x 96 seconds), so the employee learns that yes is almost always correct. Yet the 6 wrong proposals, which look like the other 294, are the only reason the employee is there.

How do you keep people reading, and how would you know if they had stopped?