59  RA Best Practices

59.1 Professionalism

For many RAs, working in a lab is their first “office” job. Although academic labs are far more casual than corporate employers, there are still general levels of professionalism that are expected:

1. Be on time for your shift and plan to stay till the end. If you need to leave early, communicate that to Susan at the START of your shift. Communicate about any absences, planned or unplanned, as promptly as possible.
2. Hold yourself to a high standard in the written material you produce - messages both to other RAs/staff and to participants should be proofread & clearly communicate what you’re asking or saying.
3. Be prepared. This can mean, having everything ready for a session before it starts, or it can mean, having reviewed all the available information before asking for help, so we are better positioned to start helping you solve an issue.
4. Be dependable. If you are assigned a task be sure to follow thorough without reminders. The most helpful thing you can do is become able to work independently and be relied on by your coworkers.
5. Be engaged. Academia is an occupation where your passion really needs to shine through!

If you are having a bad day where it is hard to pay attention to detail, it may be better to call out sick than to try to do your tasks and be unable to complete them well. It’s far easier for someone to cover your entire workload from scratch, than it is to try to fix sloppy or half-finished tasks.

59.2 Training

During training, you will be asked to watch or shadow as other staff or RAs demonstrate how to run sessions or do tasks. You should be following along in the manual with the written script or procedure, or taking notes (rather than say, browsing social media or contemplating nirvana). We will expect you to be able to follow the written procedure yourself after two or three demonstrations. If anything is still confusing at that time, you should let us know.

59.3 Documentation

We’ve done our best to provide documentation that outlines how to do every task required of an RA. However, we may have made assumptions about what is general knowledge, or things may have gotten garbled and less clear by the successive people in charge of the documentation. If you read any documentation that is unclear, confusing, etc, please let us know!

You should be proactive in reading and re-reading through our documentation, both to help you learn the ins and outs of our study and your tasks, and also to help you learn where to find the information you need to complete your tasks. Sometimes it feels easier to ask “hey, how do I do X again?” than to open the manual and bring up the instructions, but remember, we’re depending on you to be able to work independently.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask if something isn’t clear! There’s a huge difference between asking “Hey, how do I do X” and asking “Hey, I’m looking at X in the manual and I don’t understand what it means by this sentence…”

59.4 Task Success

To be successful in your tasks, you will go through three processes every time:
1. Preparation: have all the documentation and materials needed at hand before you start your task.
2. Checklist: Work through the steps in any task like a checklist. If it is easier, you can print off documentation and physically check each step off as you complete it.
3. Review: Both at each step in your checklist, and at the completion of the checklist, you will review your work and make sure it is correct and complete.

59.5 Participant communication

All communication with participants must be professional and courteous. You are a representative of our lab and of the University of Wisconsin and are therefore expected to maintain the standards which for which the university is known.

Written messages must be proofread carefully, not only for correct content but for proper punctuation, spelling, formatting, etc. Even though minor typos do happen, they look bad and can make participants less likely to trust us with their sensitive data.

Even if you are copying from a message template, errors in the template should be found and corrected prior to sending the messages. Let Susan know if you find errors in templates so they can be corrected at the source!

It is also critical that participants not receive confusing or mixed messages from us. Please verify that no other RA or staff member is currently in a message chain with a participant before adding a message about the same topic.

Sometimes, this can require some critical thinking. Say you have a participant show up on compliance check and the procedure says you should send a message about missing 8 recent daily surveys. You check their thread, and see that Ariela just messaged a participant the link to download the STAR app to their new phone. Is that a separate enough topic that you should still send the compliance message? No: a participant who just got a download link probably did not have the app for several days, and already knows that they missed these surveys. There is no need for a compliance message to remind them about missed surveys at this time.