Problem with good WLB culture

Take it you dislike socializing with your co-workers?

You need to be able to work async to make it work, without depending on your coworkers for lengthy periods of time. People prune meetings judiciously in order to remain productive and focus on high impact efforts. Chattiness at work doesn't stem from good wlb, but chattiness at home might... In any case the mentality is that you're free to chat and responsible for producing results regardless of the decision you make to chat or not.

Lack of wlb will lead to terrible life, employees churn and non innovative work. What do you prefer?

This is not wlb this is lazyness

The higher up you move in any organization, there will be more emphasis on soft skills.

Yep. My team has gone towards better WLB as product matured. Also from people just getting things done to mostly people that spend time making things sound more complicated than they actually are (e.g. a bunch of unnecessary meetings talking about it instead of just getting it done)

So you want 996?

Chatty office culture at LI is not due entirely to wlb, it's also due to the "relationship" culture and the open office layout. The office layout has now been studied and shown to decrease some productivity and doesn't foster as much collab as they thought it would (although it does allow for more comaraderie). For low value mtgs - My personal approach is to call out low value meetings if I see them happening, and to point out (politely obviously) when a topic could have been served over email, or if two ppl needed to resolve something offline before bringing everyone together to make it more impactful for a wider audience. I think that's on us to change the culture to be more productive/critically minded and less lazy. Skills - I've seen this vary by team so maybe just depends on your org. It IS annoying tho to see some ppl get promo'ed just for good soft skills when your own team demands high craftsmanship/technical execution. That's a tops-down leadership issue.

I think most of the things you said are orthogonal to WLB. Some work cultures expect employees to be in the office 12 hours a day, but they're still the way you describe. And some work hard & play hard. We emphasize technical accomplishment and useful meetings, but yes, some individuals and teams are more chatty. If you have important work to do, you'll focus, even if it's 7-8 hours a day.

At Expedia, WLB is very good. Also, promotions are not based on measurable results. Because results are just not that important in this culture. Not clear if the good wlb is correlated with this sort of culture. It is the opposite of Amazon in many ways.