Effects of working remotely

Meeting notes from discussions at the RC GAA Team meeting - Feb 12, 2021. Questions prompting the discussion:

Themes

An unfortunate side effect of always being home is that you’re never totally removed from your workplace.
Feeling pressure to work or check emails never really shuts off
The absence of a commute has been really impactful, which normally acts as a buffer to disconnect from work.
Commutes help to reflect and think about the work day, and also ease into non-work life.
Several team members echo the thoughts about not being adequately removed from their work environment, and constantly feeling pressure to work or check emails.
Space at home isn’t always ideal for working either, like if your space is also in your bedroom. This could make it hard to get up and/or go to bed at regular times.

Planning your day around a work schedule, and “pretending” to go to work.
Spending some time in your day to break away from work during normal commute times.
Go for a walk or run, listen to your favourite podcast, or do other relaxing things that let you easily disconnect from work.

Some of us have never met one another in person!
Not having regular in-person interactions has been impactful in many ways.
Digital engagement has been relatively good with the RC workshops. Much less of a barrier involved in attending and participating. People seem excited about the topics we deliver.
Allowing people to join workshops wherever they are has been an added bonus, more so considering we don’t have commutes which might make us late or limit our energy to attend.
People in workshops have been expressing gratitude, maybe because the interactive services we deliver aren’t offered too widely outside the RC.
Aside from workshops, it’s been nice having opportunities to chat about non-work things (like the world’s shortest river, hiking, restaurant spots, etc.). GAAs are welcome at our morning coffee chat, which has been a good channel for this kind of communication.
GAA bi-weekly meetings have also been taking this role to some extent as well.

UBC sub-Reddit is a place where student fatigue and burnout is very apparent. Students anecdotally acknowledge that learning remotely is challenging. It’s also very apparent to GAAs who teach in their faculties too.
It might be good to adjust RC workshop load in our online content, to avoid burnout. Maybe we’re packing in too much?
Differing levels of technology skills are also apparent to workshop instructors and consult providers. It can be challenging to just have someone click their mouse in a specific spot via Zoom.

Closed captioning in workshops was a heavily favoured topic, as it seems the technology exists (via YouTube and Zoom) is needed for students with hearing impairments or who are not native english speakers.
There are few resources provided by UBC to address this.
Workshop recordings have also been requested several times by attendees who could not make the session. It might be a good idea to revisit the idea of recording workshops. Potentially even providing them only by request, or by posting openly and updating every time we deliver the session.
Recordings would also really help with providing closed captioning.
Recording only the introductory sessions or things that can be “canned” also makes sense, so that in-person workshops focused more on the hands-on tasks. This could help manage time early on in the session so that the hands-on part doesn’t get left behind or rushed through.
Ultimately, there are elements of what we do virtually that lack when doing them in person, and vice versa. Now is a good time to be thinking about how we can make positive changes when we do move to a more in-person environment.