I got invited to a focus group at work for this afternoon on an interesting topic – a four day week at the university.
I was intrigued and pretty excited – and I felt pretty special to be chosen to participate out of all my colleagues on campus.
When I got there, though, things started to go a little downhill.
We were last of the groups (plural) to meet – every other constituency group had already shared their opinions. And I was apparently a sufficiently generic enough staff member to qualify to participate. Yea! Ordinary!
But, still, fascinating topic, right?
Except… what does that actually mean? Four ten hour days and everyone gets a three day weekend? Or no Friday classes only? Or a hybrid?
And what was the goal? Energy savings from closed buildings? Or later office hours to help evening students?
No one knew – including the moderator for the focus group. He said several times that he didn’t have any of the answers – including even what we were really talking about. In fact, he started the discussion by asking us “what we’d heard”.
The rest of the hour was speculation and brainstorming on basically rumors.
Sigh.
It was a huge waste of time.
Not a complete waste because we came up with some valid concerns from a variety of possible outcomes – but it’s hard to get excited about problem solving when everything is a guess.
Including the problem.
Sigh. Again.
For the record, we thought that the students would generally like – where feasible – to not have classes on Friday. They try to avoid them anyway. And while most of the folks were okay with a 4 day week, we generally thought it would be impractical to close the university and the departments on Fridays since so many students would still need services and have the time to make use of them on a classless Friday.
We also thought more late classes through the week to accommodate the programs without classes on Friday could present a safety issue – it gets rather dark in the winter in Ohio. And more students would be likely to leave campus for the long weekend – impacting student engagement on campus.
I’m hoping that this is just the first of many discussions and the beginning of a lot of planning, but it just kinda felt like a waste. Or maybe it was just the wrong time to meet before we had anything approaching an official plan.
And… the absolute worst part of the experience? No. SNACKS. None. The moderator didn’t even offer us a bottle of the room-temperature water on the side table.
Oooh, I wish we’d gotten comment cards. I would have commented the heck out of that.