Examining The Demographic Factors Shaping Employee Job Satisfaction in The Digital Transformation Context: A Quantitative Exploration

Abstract

Digital Transformation is a methodology of leveraging emerging digital technologies & platforms to re-imagine and re-engineer AS-IS business/operational processes, organizational culture, and user experiences to meet evolving global business requirements. Hence, reimagining the business in the digital age with technological innovation & adoption is the essence of digital transformation. Employee job satisfaction is determined by the degree to which they enjoy their job or specific aspects of it, such as the nature of their work or the quality of their job. This satisfaction level is directly correlated with their work-life balance, work performance management, job rotation/distribution, and skill management.

The key objective of this research is to quantitatively analyze the impact of demographic parameters on the Employee Job Satisfaction Index (%) after digital transformation, considering the potential impacting parameters like Years of Experience, Years of tenure in current organization, Years of tenure in current role & Avg. Yearly learning Hrs. & their correlation, if exists. This analysis not only calculates Employee Job Satisfaction Index (%) based on collected data from structured Likert scale-based interview questionnaires but also builds regression equation to analyze impact of each of the afore-mentioned parameters on gathered Employee Job Satisfaction Index (%).

Procurement management is a core integral part of any organization’s business architecture which supports the seamless functioning of other critical systems across the organizational landscape. This study is intended to deal with existing drivers of digital transformation, analyze data to understand the impact of the transformation on employee satisfaction & conclude individual impact of identified parameters to find out potential actions to make improvement in team’s job satisfaction of employees in the Procurement Division of a Malaysian Multinational Electricity & Utility Company (to be referred as Case-Organization).

As a research approach, quantitative analysis method is adopted to find out the aforementioned impact of demographic variables post digitalization on employee job satisfaction index % (post digitalization) & research considers a single case study-based approach on Malaysian Multinational Electricity & Utility Company. The primary research leveraged purposeful focused sampling with homogeneous case samples, gathered from a particular group of procurement offices & departments (where the digital transformation was exercised). This group of employees was requested to respond to a questionnaire of 25 structured questions to respond in Likert scale to understand & measure employee satisfaction index along with certain information related to experience, role, learning hrs. etc. to analyze the potential contributing factors. Single organization case study-based approach was taken in this research to evaluate in-depth analysis of the subject matter by circulating questionnaire to experienced, knowledgeable & core stakeholders. Stata-based statistical analysis is done with the help of regression analysis to understand the impact, based on gathered data.

The research reveals the importance of digital transformation from the perspective of employee satisfaction, which is typically ignored as one of the success parameters of digital transformation and also shows which all individual parameters drive employee satisfaction index when digital transformation is undertaken in an organization.

The intended research finding analysis (with certain limitations as mentioned in the sections below) should help senior management of the procurement division to measure the success of digitalization activities from employee acceptance & satisfaction perspectives by understanding human traits, resistance to change, vulnerability to apprehension, impact of learning/skill development etc. so that effective work allocation, better job rotation, improved work-life balance, enhanced work quality and efficient performance management, etc. can be promoted as human-centric outcome of digitalization.