Coping with Covid: An Effect of Employee Engagement on Satisfaction with Life in Power Sector of India

Abstract

Electricity supply falls under essential services in India. Covid pandemic has put a challenge before sectoral organisations to put employees on an increased job engagement, while employees individually are concerned for their own and their family’s overall well-beings. The current research explores the relation between employee engagement and satisfaction with life. It was a quantitative explanatory research. Employees of one of the power majors of Indian public sector utilities were surveyed using a validated questionnaire. Total 443 valid responses received. Job satisfaction with some control variables like posting location, tenure, educational qualification, shift working, gender was used as predictor variables. The dependent variable was satisfaction with life, whereas the independent variable was employee engagement. The proposed model was tested using hierarchical regression analysis in SPSS version-25. The results of regression analysis shows that employee engagement is making a significant and unique contribution to explain life satisfaction (ß = 0.228; p <0.001). The introduction of job satisfaction and control variables while controlled for employee engagement explained additional 16.3% of variance in satisfaction with life (R square change = 0.163; F (8,433) = 27.186; p<0.001). The finding of the research is expected to help HR professionals to frame the policies more conclusively in the changing times.