Impact of Changes in General Working Environment on Employee Engagement: Moderating Effect of COVID-19 Status in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Employee engagement is one of the absorptions of the human resources department in any organization. Many programs are run to increase employee engagement value from year to year. This study aims to analyze the influence of COVID-19 Safety Practices and Flexible Working hours on employee engagement with moderating effect of COVID-19 proliferation. COVID-19 pandemic originated in China has rapidly spread across the world. The global destruction caused by this disaster has not yet been deep-rooted. In this crisis, the respective authorities and governments put several efforts to control the pandemic outbreak. In the face of this emergency, different rules and regulations were enforced by different countries. The respondents of this study focus on operational level worker in Apparel industry in Gampaha District. The apparel industry significantly contributes to the GDP in Sri Lanka as it accounts for 15% of Sri Lanka’s exports and provides over 300,000 direct employment and 600,000 indirect employment opportunities. The type of research used is quantitative with survey method. Research respondents were 384 people, and the data were analyzed using several data analyze techniques with regression and correlation effect. The results show that there is a significant influence of Safety practices and flexible working hours on employee engagement. We also used ANOVA test to see that employee motivation have a function as a Moderate or not in this study. According to the results, COVID-19 has the effect of Moderating between work environment and employee engagement.