Randall Shannon for providing me with the guidance and recommendations I needed to continue writing this feature paper on the impact of telecommuting on employee engagement. The dependent variable in this study is the drivers of employee engagement (based on the Aon Hewitt engagement model), and telecommuting is one factor influencing employee engagement post-pandemic. As it shows how the new telecommuting approach affects employee engagement, there is a strong correlation between telecommuting and employee engagement.
KEYWORDS: Employee Engagement / Working From Home, COVID-19 / Human Resource Development / Remote Working / Aon Hewitt Engagement Model. This clearly shows that remote working models are still widely used even after the COVID-19 crisis. AON Hewitt makes an important contribution to the research of this thematic article by studying the impact of remote working on employee engagement, as the model defines employee engagement as the psychological and behavioral effects that contribute to better employee performance.
Research Objectives
Research Questions
LITERATURE REVIEW
- Employee Engagement
- Remote Working
- Remote Working and Traditional Working
- Remote Working and Employee Engagement
- Engagement
- Work task
- Collaboration
- Autonomy
- Rewards and Recognition
- Communication with leaders and colleagues
- Work/Life balance
- Learning and Development
- Conceptual Framework
According to Cambridge Dictionary (Remote Working, 2022), the definition of remote working is the practice of an employee working from home, or any other place that is not an organization's usual work location. Looking back on the term, it is said that remote work is a concept that was defined in the twentieth century. Remote work is defined as when employees perform tasks at different workplaces, such as at home, using information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers, the Internet and telephones (Garret & Danziger, 2007).
Another research study shows that there are several meanings behind the term "Remote Working", highlighting the similarity. Telecommuting factors include three dimensions to reaping the full benefits of telecommuting: people; process; and infrastructure. The final dimension is infrastructure, which includes the technological and physical aspects crucial for facilitating remote work such as internet, information and communication platforms (Ghanbari and Bakhtjoo, 2017).
According to many studies, typical workplaces rely heavily on face-to-face interaction, while telecommuting is defined as an approach that does not require a physical connection. Although the number of telecommuters is increasing, the factors and characteristics of telecommuting allow employees to be disengaged from work and. According to a published study on the correlation between telecommuting and employee engagement, respondents rated their organization's engagement level as 3 out of 5 (Anand & Acharya, 2021).
The study conducted in this paper aims to demonstrate how autonomy helps to develop employee engagement in the digital age, especially during remote work situations. The previous study examined the effects and impacts of telecommuting on employees during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of communication and found that telecommuting had a significant impact on communication (Baakeel, 2021).
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Participants and procedure
Quantitative Method
The three questions include Does your organization have communication channels or activities in place to effectively support remote working? If you work remotely, does your organization have a good remote work process or procedure in place to effectively support your work? And do you have access to all the available infrastructure, hardware, data and platforms you need, such as application or VPN access, to be productive while working remotely? In addition to the three dimensions of the study area of remote work, a remote work policy question has been added to analyze the frequency of remote work policies within organizations as the question is how many days your company has a policy for remote working.
The first dependent variable in the third part is work engagement, which aims to investigate the effect of remote working on work engagement. The questions related to the second dependent variable are designed to assess the impact of remote working on the work task dimension, taking into account employee productivity, job challenges, organizational work process understanding, employee work purpose, and quality delivery of the job. product within the employee's scope of work. . In addition, questions related to third dependent variables, focusing on collaboration, are designed to explore the influence of remote working on best practices and job knowledge sharing, as well as collaboration between colleagues.
The questions are asked to collect the respondents' degree of agreement as follows: My colleagues respect my thoughts and feelings when I work remotely, my colleagues and I work together effectively when working remotely, colleagues and I share best practices and work knowledge with each other when we work remotely, and I am willing to participate in more informal company activities and promote good collaboration during remote work. Questions on the fourth dependent variables are created based on autonomy dimension, with an attempt to determine the impact of remote work on the decision-making and authority of employees. The fifth dependent variable in the third section is rewards and recognition, which is intended to examine the effect of telecommuting on the recognition of an employee's contributions as well as satisfaction with benefits and welfare.
Meanwhile, questions related to the sixth dependent variable, focused on communication with leaders and colleagues, are designed to examine the influence of remote working on employees' connectivity with their supervisors and colleagues. The questions on the seventh dependent variable are designed to assess the impact of remote working on the work-life balance dimension. The question is asked to collect the respondents' level of agreement as follows: The balance between my work and personal commitments is good for me when I work remotely.
RESEARCH FINDINGS AND DATA ANALYSIS
- Number of responses
- Physical Gender
- Marital Status
- Type of organization
- Years of work experience
- Reliability Test
- Descriptive Analytic
- General question on remote working policy
- General question on communication channels
- General question on remote working process or procedure
- General question on the available infrastructure, hardware, data, and platforms
- Descriptive Analytics for engagement driver questions
- Exploratory Factor Analysis: EFA
- Overall engagement
- Engagement drivers
This produces patterns that can be used to answer research questions and objectives about how telecommuting affects employee engagement. Does your organization have communication channels or activities set up to support remote work? For the third general question of remote work, the results show that most respondents' organizations develop a proper remote work process or procedure to effectively support your work; the number is 43.1%.
For the last general telecommuting question, the result shows that most of the respondents' organizations can access all the available infrastructure, hardware, data and platforms they need—such as app or VPN access—to be productive while working remotely; the number is 55.9%. When working remotely, does your organization develop an appropriate remote work process or procedure to support. After illustrating the data based on the general questions mentioned above, the table below describes the data that identifies the most important telecommuting factors that influence the drivers of engagement.
In other words, collaboration between employees during remote work had significant positive effects on overall engagement. To examine how multiple independent variables of telecommuting are related to each dependent variable, which are drivers of engagement, the multiple linear regression is used and the details of all statistical tests are shown in the tables below. Since the F-value was 1.836 and significant value equal to 0.128 (p> 0.05), this shows that none of the telecommuting factors is significantly related to the work task.
The results showed that the F value was 8.210 and the statistical test value was 0.002, it can be concluded that some remote work factors significantly affect autonomy. Since the F value was 2.392 and the significant value equal to 0.056 (p> . 0.05), this indicates that none of the telecommuting factors are significantly related to rewards and recognition. Based on the findings that the F value was 6.839 and the statistical test value was less than 0.001, it can be concluded that some remote work factors have a significant impact on communication with supervisors and supervisor of colleagues.
The F-value of 1.87 and significance level of 0.121 (p > 0.05) indicate that none of the remote work factors are significantly related to rewards and recognition.
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
- Discussion
- Recommendations
- Limitations and future research of the study
- Conclusion
Therefore, it was necessary to describe all dimensions to be considered under the employee engagement scheme, such as the surveys the author conducted based on the Aon Hewitt engagement model. According to the regression model data, remote work factors positively impact several engagement drivers, including autonomy. As seen in the data, the number of remote working days or the frequency that employees work remotely is related to the autonomy manager.
In addition, one of the three dimensions, infrastructure, has been identified as one of the most influential remote working factors influencing engagement drivers; infrastructure positively influences the driving force behind collaborative engagement. The approach to remote working is an element associated with a positive impact on the engagement of an organization's employees; including remote working factors—. With the information and analysis found in this research, there is no denying that remote working will be seen as the new normal.
Even though all three dimensions, when considered as factors of remote work that employers establish for employees, have an impact on employee engagement, it is clearly seen that infrastructure is the most essential factor among the three dimensions. First, the organization and the employers must establish solid infrastructure internally and strongly to improve the effectiveness of remote work. Furthermore, for any organization that wants to improve their remote work efficiency while also keeping employees engaged, the initial data and information and the fundamental propositional approaches in this study can be used with the targeted respondents, with the result being more informative and useful for organizational development.
It also identifies the important factors of remote work that have an indisputable effect on employee engagement. The findings showed that the influential factors of telecommuting that affect the driver of engagement based on the Aon Hewitt Engagement Model are infrastructure;.
Investigating the impact of telecommuting on employee productivity and work-life balance: A study of the business consulting industry in Dubai, UAE. Proposal to improve employee engagement in PT Maju Sentosa by AON Hewitt Model and Mercer Model.
