{"id":2280,"date":"2017-10-11T00:09:29","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T00:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/?p=2280"},"modified":"2017-10-11T00:09:29","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T00:09:29","slug":"un-focus-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/11\/un-focus-group\/","title":{"rendered":"un-focus group"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got invited to a focus group at work for this afternoon on an interesting topic – a four day week at the university.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was intrigued and pretty excited – and I felt pretty special to be chosen to participate out of all my colleagues on campus. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I got there, though, things started to go a little downhill.<\/span><\/p>\n

We were last of the groups (plural) to meet – every other constituency group had already shared their opinions. \u00a0And I was apparently a sufficiently generic enough staff member to qualify to participate. \u00a0Yea! Ordinary!<\/span><\/p>\n

But, still, fascinating topic, right?<\/span><\/p>\n

Except\u2026 what does that actually mean? \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Four ten hour days and everyone gets a three day weekend? \u00a0Or no Friday classes only? \u00a0Or a hybrid? \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And what was the goal? \u00a0Energy savings from closed buildings? \u00a0Or later office hours to help evening students?<\/span><\/p>\n

No one knew – including the moderator for the focus group. \u00a0He said several times that he didn\u2019t have any<\/em> of the answers – including even what we were really talking about. \u00a0In fact, he started the discussion by asking us \u201cwhat we\u2019d heard<\/em>\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The rest of the hour was speculation and brainstorming on basically rumors. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a huge waste of time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not a complete<\/em> waste because we came up with some valid concerns from a variety of possible outcomes – but it\u2019s hard to get excited about problem solving when everything is a guess.<\/span><\/p>\n

Including the problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sigh. Again.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the record, we thought that the students would generally like – where feasible – to not have classes on Friday. \u00a0They try to avoid them anyway. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0And more students would be likely to leave campus for the long weekend – impacting student engagement on campus.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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. \u00a0Or maybe it was just the wrong time to meet before we had anything approaching an official plan.<\/span><\/p>\n

And\u2026 the absolute worst part of the experience? \u00a0\u00a0No. SNACKS.<\/strong> \u00a0None. \u00a0The moderator didn\u2019t even offer us a bottle of the room-temperature water on the side table.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oooh, I wish we\u2019d gotten comment cards. \u00a0I would have commented the heck out of that. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0 When I got there, though, things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2281,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions\/2281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}