Research doesn’t just involve collecting and analysising data, or writing reports. It involves endless admin and negotiation. I returned to work on a data request, accessibility, public communications, plus equity and diversity planning.

Leave

I achived very little during my leave. It was great! On the first day of leave, I did virtually nothing. It felt amazing. I mostly rested. The most onerous activity was rearranging things around the house, including my hefty earrings collection. The second day was mostly the same, with more TikTok videos thrown in for good measure.

Coordination

Back at work today, with a whole heap of running after stakeholder actions. Even though I was only away two weeks, everything is on overdrive.

I focused on getting our final data requirements and liaising with human resources to get de-identified administrative data to pilot our randomised control trial.

Our governance group sent us their approval of our trial materials. We are now finally set to brief our secretary. As I’ve said before, this will take at least a month for their approval. But we are on our way!

We finished our accessibility audit. It’s part of my role on our disability inclusion steering committee. Other colleagues did most of the heavy lifting and my job was just to coordinate our response for the external auditors.

Communications

There was much to do on public comms. First, I published a blog post by my colleagues on how to increase survey completions. Second, I reviewed our communications stats. We achieved 42% open rate for our newsletter last week. This is the second highest performing newsletter ever (and more than twice the policy sector average). Plus we had 600 clicks on individual links within our newsletter. This is a new record for us. The online workshops we advertised in our newsletter had completely sold out within three days. Two of them had almost completely sold out in less than 24 hours.

I worked with my director on our forward planning for some blog posts and media articles that our team will lead.

Equity and diversity

The day ended with a longer than expected, but very constructive, meeting with two colleagues from my team. I’ve mentioned we’ve been collaborating on improving our equity and diversity practices. We agreed on how we will incorporate our recommendations into our research and report templates. We’ve also planned for some external experts to deliver training to our team.

Personal research

I’ve got a little bit of work tonight on my own research. I must answer a whole heap of email that’s come through my website. This includes some media requests that I am feeling ambivalent about. I lack the time or cognitive bandwidth to deal with these requests right now. We’ll see how I go!