An Analysis of Employee Work Environment: Improving Methods for Engagement, Affective Commitment, and Return-to-Office Strategies

Employee engagement and organizational affective commitment are increasingly popular topics, especially with the rise of remote workplaces and hybrid work models. This project focuses on the engagement and commitment levels of employees at a mid-sized software organization. While this organization (hereafter referred to as "The Company") is a global entity, this project focused on its United States branch. After the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, travel for events and on-site client engagements were heavily disrupted, as did their in-person work schedule. Employee engagement and affective organizational commitment were observed utilizing a 33-item survey that included existing measures such as Utrecht's Work Engagement Scale (2004) and the Allen & Meyer (1990) Organizational Commitment Survey. The results gathered from the survey helped to create an informed guide for an interview which provided clarity on employee engagement and commitment in relation to one’s work environment. The results gathered from the survey suggest that frequency of remote work positively correlates with employee engagement, but not with affective commitment. Changes to the frequency of remote work negatively correlate with higher levels of engagement and organizational commitment. There were no significant differences in engagement or commitment with race, but tenure, gender, and age were found to have a significant positive relationship with commitment. There is an additional need for change management initiatives to ease employees into any work format and scheduling shifts. Additionally, when transitioning work schedules or planning return-to-office initiatives, change management processes may be required to ensure that engagement levels do not decrease.