Personal writing on work, power, and becoming — the human side of the research.
What I Stand For
I spent years researching why work breaks people. Then life broke me open too.
I'm Sreedevi — a PhD researcher in Organizational Management, a former Head of Department, and the founder of Project DEVI. But those are just the containers. What I actually do is simpler: I name the things people feel at work but can't say out loud.
Here's what I believe, plainly:
Work is not just where we earn. It's where we become — or unbecome. We spend most of our waking lives inside systems designed to measure us. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking what those systems do to the human inside them. I ask that question for a living.
The problem comes before the solution. I don't sell fixes. I research problems — deeply, honestly, structurally — because a solution built on a misunderstood problem is just another burden. If you want someone to tell you everything is fine, I'm not your person. If you want someone to show you what's actually happening, stay.
Nothing is black and white. It's all grey. People are not data points. A dashboard can tell you someone's output dropped 14%. It can't tell you they're quietly drowning. I work in that grey — where the numbers end and the human begins.
Vulnerability is data. The moments we're most afraid to name — the burnout we hide, the help we don't ask for — are the most important information a workplace can hold. I treat them that way.
Project DEVI exists for one reason: to put the human back at the center of the future of work. Not as a slogan. As a practice.
The Watched Worker
There is a new kind of tired, and it doesn't show up on any dashboard.
It belongs to the worker whose keystrokes are counted, whose screen is captured, whose "active hours" are scored by a system that never sleeps. By every metric, they're performing. By every human measure, they're disappearing.
I call this hidden burnout — exhaustion that must be concealed, because the same systems that create it also punish visible struggle. You can't tell your manager you're drowning when the algorithm has already flagged your productivity dip. So you smile on the video call. You keep typing. You burn out quietly, efficiently, measurably.
My doctoral research took me into the lives of platform workers across Kerala, India — delivery executives managed entirely by algorithms: assigned by code, rated by strangers, penalized by automation. I went in to study their stress as a researcher. I came out with a question I couldn't put down: what happens when this same logic climbs into corporate offices?
Here's what the evidence tells us so far. Workplaces that digitally monitor employees see higher stress, lower trust, and a particular kind of strain that comes from being watched by something that can't understand context. A bad week becomes a bad score. A human moment becomes a data anomaly.
But the deeper problem isn't the surveillance itself. It's the silence around it. Workers don't talk about what tracking does to them — because admitting struggle feels like confessing failure to the very system that's watching. That's structural stigma: not one person's prejudice, but a whole architecture that makes honesty dangerous.
This is the problem I'm researching now. Not to destroy technology — but to ask, before it becomes universal: how do we build workplaces where people can be both measured and human?
The watched worker is already here. The question is whether we'll see them in time.
Why DEVI
DEVI means goddess. I didn't choose the name to be grand. I chose it because this project was born the way goddesses are born in old stories — out of something broken being remade.
For years, I was the good academic. PhD in Organizational Management. Head of Department. Published, professional, proper. I studied stress in other people the way you're supposed to — at a distance, through instruments, with clean methodology.
Then my own life came apart. Not in one dramatic moment, but in the slow, grey way things actually fall apart .
And somewhere in the middle of that, I realized something that changed my research forever: I had been studying burnout in everyone except myself.
Project DEVI is what came out the other side. It's not a consultancy in the traditional sense — not yet, not only. It's a research practice with a human pulse. I investigate how modern work harms people — surveillance, algorithmic management, the stigma of struggling — and I do it as someone who knows what it feels like from the inside.
That's the whole methodology, really. Rigorous enough to present at international conferences. Human enough to tell the truth.
I'm not here to fix your workplace in a quarter. I'm here to help you see it clearly — maybe for the first time. Because you can't heal what you won't name.
And I name things.