Predictors of Well-being and Productivity among Software Professionals during the COVID-19 Pandemic -- A Longitudinal Study

TL;DR

This longitudinal study identifies key psychological and social factors affecting software engineers' well-being and productivity during COVID-19 lockdowns, highlighting adaptation over time and the limited causal influence of measured variables.

Contribution

It provides novel longitudinal insights into how various psychological, social, and situational factors influence software professionals' well-being and productivity during enforced remote work.

Findings

Social contact quality positively predicts well-being.

Stress negatively impacts well-being.

Boredom and distractions reduce productivity.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide to impose movement restrictions on their citizens. Although critical to reducing the virus' reproduction rate, these restrictions come with far-reaching social and economic consequences. In this paper, we investigate the impact of these restrictions on an individual level among software engineers who were working from home. Although software professionals are accustomed to working with digital tools, but not all of them remotely, in their day-to-day work, the abrupt and enforced work-from-home context has resulted in an unprecedented scenario for the software engineering community. In a two-wave longitudinal study (N=192), we covered over 50 psychological, social, situational, and physiological factors that have previously been associated with well-being or productivity. Examples include anxiety, distractions, coping strategies, psychological and physical needs, office set-up, stress, and work motivation. This design allowed us to identify the variables that explained unique variance in well-being and productivity. Results include (1) the quality of social contacts predicted positively, and stress predicted an individual's well-being negatively when controlling for other variables consistently across both waves; (2) boredom and distractions predicted productivity negatively; (3) productivity was less strongly associated with all predictor variables at time two compared to time one, suggesting that software engineers adapted to the lockdown situation over time; and (4) longitudinal analyses did not provide evidence that any predictor variable causal explained variance in well-being and productivity. Overall, we conclude that working from home was per se not a significant challenge for software engineers.