I’m hearing more & more from higher ed & student affairs practitioners that work-from-home has meant feeling even more surveilled through an overreliance on Zoom meetings, daily check-ins & “tell me all the things you’re doing to stay productive today” (1/?)

making folks feel even more overworked & stressed & pressured to prove their value than usual (ironically?) with institutional & supervisors’ responses regurgitating the same-old same-old “self-care” solutions that maintains the burden on individual staff. (2/?)

So lemme quickly slide in this piece that @DianSquire & @trans_killjoy wrote not so long ago about this. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1086482219869997 (3/?)

You know what helps to create a better ‘work-life balance’? Reducing the work! #ThanksMath.
Departments & institutions have a lot of power to alleviate these pressures from their staff: make decisions together about ‘work’ that is more busy-work than necessary work; (4/?)

institute Zoom-free days weekly; ‘close’ campus for half a day weekly so everyone has some time back without having to use their limited sick or vacation days (which may already have been used up esp. for folks who are sick/disabled); (5/?)

allow folks to use work hours towards health care related appointments or breaks; when Zoombombing happens, reach out to staff to see how they’re doing; create non-work reasons for co-workers to connect and again, during work hours; and so much more. (6/?)

Note: these are all also things that can happen in a non-pandemic world w major credit to disability justice folks in particular who’ve been calling for these things for AGES! (7/?)

Folks are more scared than ever about losing their jobs & may be too afraid to say something about needs & overextending themselves - those with organizational power have incredible sway in exacerbating or reducing stressors on practitioners’ well-being (8/?)

So maybe, just maybe... that deadline can be moved. Or that new project doesn't need to be started right now. Or folks have better things to do than count the minutes they're sitting in front of a computer. Just maybe. /rant (9/9)