Employee Engagement Management in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in protracted lockdowns, causing businesses to reconsider keeping their operations running smoothly without interruption. Employee engagement has played a critical role in achieving this. This research aimed to see what strategies business organizations use to keep their employees significantly engaged during the pandemic. A systematic review of empirical studies conducted between 2020 and 2022 is synthesized. The review revealed that offering mental relief care and resilience were the most preferred approaches to enhance employee engagement. Competency building, demonstrating employee empathy, and directing expectations helped in job engagement. The review offers insight and implications for organizations and policymakers on strategizing engagement policies and maintaining the well-being of their employees in tough times. Finally, the review established a call for future research agenda.

Review of work from home empirical research during Covid-19

“…The most common unit of analysis is the keywords that reflect the main content of an article ( Jain et al, 2022b , Jain et al, 2022a ; Callon et al, 1983 ). In the case of finding the common or most minor areas of investigation, this co-occurrence of keywords in articles is taken as the unit of analysis ( Andrlić et al, 2023 ; Aparicio et al, 2019 ; Priyashantha et al, 2021a , Priyashantha et al, 2021c , Priyashantha et al, 2022b ; Priyashantha, 2022 ; Priyashantha, Dahanayake, & Maduwanthi, 2022 ). Thus, the links of such networks can be created using the co-occurrence relationship of such keywords in the articles ( Aparicio et al, 2019) .…”

“…After relativizing the interconnection of keywords, meaningful information about the content in the keyword co-occurrence network visualization can be obtained ( Cobo et al, 2012 ; Priyashantha et al, 2022b ). This process is done by normalizing the keyword co-occurrence network visualization ( Andrlić et al, 2023 ; van Eck & Waltman, 2014b ). As a result, by default, the VOSviewer employs association strength normalization and generates a network in a two-dimensional space ( Priyashantha et al, 2022a ; van Eck & Waltman, 2014b ).…”

“…VOSviewer uses colors to denote the cluster assigned to a node. As a result, a cluster may indicate a common theme ( Andrlić et al, 2023 ; X. Chen et al, 2016 ; Dogra & Parrey, 2022 ; van Eck & Waltman, 2014b ).…”

“…Posited by the VOSviewer user manual, the default colors of the keyword density visualization map at each point range from blue to green to red, and weightage is denoted by the number of keywords in its vicinity ( Andrlić et al, 2023 ; van Eck & Waltman, 2014b ). Keywords pointing to blue indicate the lower weight, and green denotes average weighted keywords ( Andrlić et al, 2023 ; X. Chen et al, 2016 ; van Eck & Waltman, 2014b ).…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Data Governance Research: Trends, Collaborations, and Future Directions

“…Using the co-occurrence of the keywords in an article, different links can be made (Aparicio et al, 2019). In a map known as "keyword cooccurrence network visualization," the VOSviewer depicts these connections (Andrlić et al, 2023;Dogra & Priyashantha, 2023;Priyashantha, 2023;Priyashantha, De Alwis, et al, 2022). The term co-occurrence analysis is essential to identifying the term used in article abstracts.…”