Things I can’t work with from others
1. A panelist notified me a few days before a scheduled two-hour pre-conference call that she wouldn’t be able to make it. (The conference call was scheduled for two hours and I told panelists to plan on two hours). Since she can’t make it, I schedule a time to met with her to go over what she will have missed. The scheduled time comes and she is not on the zoom link I sent her. I check in with her 15 minutes after the call was scheduled to start. She takes her time getting back to me and says she is driving home from work. I ask her her eta as there is another panelist on the call. She doesn’t respond until it is 40 minutes after the scheduled call time and then she says she is home. She came onto the call 45 minutes after the scheduled start time, the start time that I inconvenienced myself out of a very busy schedule to bring her up to speed. I end the call two hours after the other panelist has hopped on the call, which was 15 minutes after the time that the call was scheduled to begin. The panelist who I scheduled the call for was on the call for an hour and half. Today she says that she can only spend an hour on a second call, which is being scheduled for two hours, and that the last call was longer than she expected. I don’t know where she is getting her expectations from since I clearly said to plan on two hours. This is a panelist that I already had some concerns about.
2. The other panelist I mentioned in number one above simply didn’t show up for the original scheduled call. This is a panelist who has been relatively unresponsive to emails and has also sent in things after deadlines.
3. One of the other evaluators messaged me coding she had offered to do. I was happy she offered to help out with the coding since each interview should have at least two coders on it. She had put her coding into a google doc, which stripped the continuous line numbers from the manuscript. This is a pain since I use the line numbers to transfer coding over if people don’t have access to the qualitative software program we’re using. Then I saw the quality of her coding. OMG it was horrific. So many missed codes and so much uncoded text. She coded phrases and left other text in paragraphs that was on the same topic uncoded.
The quality of other people’s work and other people’s accountability matters. My time is very limited. Other people’s unaccountability or sub-par work has easily cost me at least 80 hours within the last year. Those are two weeks that I could have been working on other projects or relaxing.