Interview Scheduling Can Be Tricky

Congratulations, you’re set to do a research study with a global organization with offices and employees all over the world.  From the moment you begin communications with them, you begin to schedule meetings using direct invitations from your Outlook or Google Calendar, Tungle, or the latest in online scheduling tools.  Everything runs smoothly and your interviews and meetings go off without a hitch.

Continuing on your successful roll, you agree to facilitate a study with another group.  Like always, you get the study set up and start scheduling interviews and meetings with the study participants, but on Day 1 you call your first participant and he/she is not available.  Hmmmm.  Curious.  You call your 2nd participant.  Same thing. Not available.  Now there’s concern.  Next thing you receive is a frantic email from your first call wondering where you are??

Stop.  How could this happen?  You check your communications and you did call at the right time.  How could things have gotten so messed up?  Better yet, how are you going to fix it?  Here are 3 things you need to make sure are in place when you are scheduling interviews with participants.

1. Be mindful of how your participants might generally interact when it comes to meetings.

In other words, do they generally meet with people locally or are they accustomed to speaking with people all over the world.  If they are only used to talking to people in their immediate area, they may not even think to look at the time zone indicated in their communications.  Make sure that time zones are clearly marked in any emails or letters to them.  It’s also a good idea to show them their appointment in multiple zones (e.g.  4:00pm EST/1:00pm PST).

2. If you are using a scheduling program or software, be sure that it converts time zone based on the
participant.

You need to be able to input your schedule in your home base time zone, but it needs to be clear to the participants which one they are scheduling in.

3.  Confirmations are critical.

Many systems are set up to do automatic confirmations by email.  However, you may want to consider doing a phone confirmation. This human touch is generally better received than an impersonal email but also can confirm that the participant knows the exact time and time zone.

Have any other tips for avoiding scheduling disasters?  We welcome your comments here!

Categories: Cross Cultural Research