Work Life Balance is Dead, DX Stays

Preface

Two thirds [1] of the global workforce have already, or would consider, changing their job if their employer would insist on returning to the office. The covid pandemic has undoubtedly changed the perspective of workers on their work environment. Work benefits are no longer centered around the office amenities, nobody really cares if you have a coffee machine or offer a shared PlayStation to cool off – the workers that would benefit, probably have both at home already.

Work commutes often take up unnecessary time off the day, daily or weekly house chores like washing your clothes can be done in sync with work, mostly everyone who worked through the two years of the pandemic realized this – working from home (WFH) can help you better manage your time.

Following the same dataset we could also conclude that WFH has its downsides – over a half of workers report poor work performance due to mental health issues. This could be attributed to several factors like isolation, blurred lines between life and work, lack of social contact and even degradation in amenities utilized for work.

Especially the blurry contrast between work and life is seemingly emerging as the next work-life balance issue, that we’ll need to keep an eye on. One could even say that our work-life balance is quite unbalanced now. That’s where  (DX) can come to the rescue, at least for some of these workers, granted developers are apparently feeling the adverse effects in full force [2].

The meeting fatigue

Being a developer I can attest that one of the most talked about issues between my colleagues is the quality and quantity of meetings. As ICSE points out, there are some notable work areas that have suffered direct hits with the rise of WFH.

• Feeling of being socially connected with your team has dramatically decreased
• So did the ability to efficiently brainstorm with your colleagues
• And lastly, the ease of communication has worsened

Coupled with the increased quantity of meetings, while their quality and usefulness remains the same, this sets an unprecedented issue for productivity and the team's ability to deliver.

What can you do about that in regards to DX ?

The first and most obvious path is to focus on the quality and quantity of your scheduled meetings. We can go ahead and call these .