Lather, Rinse, Repeat (contributed by Michelle. St. Pierre)Like the instructions we so frequently ignore on the side of the shampoo bottle (who really shampoos twice?!) I have found myself glossing over the instructions in my Facilitator Guides. What’s worse is that I’m ignoring my own directions – I wrote the guides. I must have thought these were valuable steps at some point, and after my experience yesterday I remember why.
In my FG I have some checklists – Prior to class, Day of class, Post-class, etc. In the Day of Class checklist, I have the following:
· Log on 15 minutes early
· Load slides
· Verify URLs are still valid for post-class survey
· Test audio
But did I do any of them yesterday? No. And did it bite me in the rear end? Yes.
I was running late to start the session, and I only got in there with 5 minutes to spare. Ok, no problem, I made it work. Then as we’re getting started we had some audio issues, which in retrospect, I think had to do with a participant dialing in by cell phone, so that probably couldn’t have been prevented even with an audio check. But the worst and most embarrassing was my post-class survey, whose URL I did not verify.
It turns out that in setting up the session, the survey link had been pre-filled in with the “email link” (one link, one unique response) instead of the “web link” (one link, many responses). As participants exited the session and were redirected to the survey link, each person saw the previous respondent’s answers, and then overwrote them with their own answers. I didn’t realize this until I exited the session myself and was redirected to the survey – and saw the last person’s responses. I was mortified, especially because I could have fixed it – if I had checked the link before class, I would have seen the problem and corrected it in time.
Lesson learned about following instructions. Maybe that second shampooing really will add shine? It’s worth finding out.
