Software Engineers Engagement and Job Satisfaction: A Survey with

Practitioners Working Remotely in a Public Organization

Lidiany Cerqueira

1,2 a

, Lourene Lobato Nunes

, Viviane Malheiros

, Renan Guerra

Beatriz Santana

, Rodrigo Sp

ınola

, Manoel Mendonc¸a

and Jos

e Amancio Macedo Santos

Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Federal University of Sergipe, Lagarto, Sergipe, Brazil

Data Processing Federal Service, Brazil

Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, U.S.A.

State University of Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil

Keywords:

Work Engagement, Job Satisfaction, Productivity, Soft Factors.

Abstract:

Context: Work engagement is related to a positive fulﬁlling work-related mental state. Job satisfaction refers

to how professionals are satisﬁed with their work. Measuring work engagement and job satisfaction can help

organizations to foster employee productivity, as they are related. Objective: This study aims to analyze the

work engagement and job satisfaction of software practitioners working in remote environment in a public

organization. Method: We assess the engagement and job satisfaction of software professionals at a large

governmental software organization. We surveyed a group of 148 employees and performed a quantitative

and qualitative analysis of the responses. Results: The respondents reported good level of engagement and

job satisfaction, 63% of them would recommend their team to a friend. The survey also reveals that career

development, psychological safety, team, management and rewards, beneﬁts, meeting planning, and social

interactions are the factors that most affect the satisfaction of software professionals. Conclusion: The results

of this study can help software organizations in fostering workplace improvement and satisfaction of software

development teams. For researchers, results provide a grounded view of work engagement and job satisfaction,

guiding new research efforts aligned with the demands and current context as experienced by practitioners.

For practitioners, the identiﬁed factors provide empirical reference for improving work environments. We

summarized them in a cheat sheet frame.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the competitive software industry, tech companies

face the challenge of increasing the quality while

reducing production costs of their products. To

achieve this objective, they often seek to increase their

team’s productivity, which is affected by human fac-

tors (Canedo and Santos, 2019) such as engagement

and job satisfaction (Franc¸a et al., 2018; Murphy-Hill

et al., 2019; Panteli et al., 2018).

Tech companies have investigated these factors

to understand how they affect their team’s produc-

tivity. For instance, Google researchers found that

the best teams were productive because they worked

together well, regardless of who was on the team

(Duhigg, 2016). They also point out that successful

managers foster employee engagement and job sat-

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4989-0986

isfaction (Harrel and Barbato, 2018). Microsoft re-

searchers proposed a theory of software developer job

satisfaction and perceived productivity (Storey et al.,

2019) and identiﬁed work environment factors that

affect the satisfaction and perceived productivity of

software engineers (Johnson et al., 2019). Also, soft-

ware communities such as GitHub and Stack Over-

ﬂow are trying to understand what makes developers

and teams perform better, be more productive, and

have a great developer experience. Empirical studies

conducted by Franc¸a et al. (2018) identiﬁed a variety

of factors that affect the motivation and satisfaction of

software engineers, and proposed a theory of software

engineers’ motivation and job satisfaction. Overall,

these studies indicate that measuring work engage-

ment and job satisfaction can help organizations to

understand and predict productivity (Forsgren et al.,

2021; Murphy-Hill et al., 2019; Storey et al., 2019).

Cerqueira, L., Nunes, L., Malheiros, V., Guerra, R., Santana, B., Spínola, R., Mendonça, M. and Santos, J.

Software Engineers Engagement and Job Satisfaction: A Survey with Practitioners Working Remotely in a Public Organization.

DOI: 10.5220/0012676400003690

In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2024) - Volume 2, pages 65-76

ISBN: 978-989-758-692-7; ISSN: 2184-4992

Several soft and technical factors may impact

work engagement and job satisfaction (Storey et al.,

2019; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018). Software compa-

nies often do not know how these factors affect their

work environment (Canedo and Santos, 2019). Ad-

ditionally, the accelerating adoption of remote work

increases the challenges of managing virtual teams

and the need to examine what impacts them (Pan-

teli et al., 2018). Organizations need to understand

the impact of employee engagement in a technology-

mediated remote work environment as it can be an

early predictor of burnout and can lead to poor job

performance, low job satisfaction, absenteeism, and

employee turnover (Maslach and Leiter, 2016; Panteli

et al., 2018).

Our study investigates the work engagement and

job satisfaction of software practitioners working

in a remote environment of a large federal gov-

ernment technology company. To this end, it sur-

veyed 148 software practitioners and analyzed their

responses qualitatively and quantitatively. The survey

participants work as managers, architects, designers,

support, and programmers in a software development

department. Results indicate that they have good level

of work engagement and that 63% of the participants

would recommend their team to a friend. During the

analysis, we coded 28 soft factors and two technical

factors, which, according to the participants’ percep-

tion, can help the company improve satisfaction in the

workplace.

Practitioners can use our results to foster work-

place improvement and satisfaction of software devel-

opment teams. For researchers, our results provide a

grounded view of work engagement and job satisfac-

tion in a software company, guiding new research ef-

forts aligned with the demands and current context as

experienced by practitioners. The results contribute

to build knowledge on the topic by considering a spe-

ciﬁc context: governmental organization and remote

work.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2

presents the key concepts and related work on soft-

ware engineering work engagement and job satisfac-

tion. We present the survey design in Section 3, re-

sults in Section 4, and discussions in Section 5. Sec-

tion 6 presents the threats to the study validity. Sec-

tion 7 concludes the paper with our ﬁnal considera-

tions and future perspectives.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

This section explores key concepts on software engi-

neering work engagement, job satisfaction, and pro-

ductivity.

Work engagement refers to a positive dispositional

state of mind, of pleasure and connection with the

work activities, characterized by vigor, dedication,

and concentration (Vazquez et al., 2015). It is related

to high levels of energy and mental resilience at work,

along with a sense of signiﬁcance, inspiration, pride,

challenge, and concentration (Vazquez et al., 2015).

Job satisfaction refers to how satisﬁed employees

are with their work, team, tools, or culture (Forsgren

et al., 2021). Researchers and companies do realize

that productivity and job satisfaction are related to

each other (Storey et al., 2019). Satisfaction is one

of the most valued dimensions of productivity in soft-

ware development (Forsgren et al., 2021).

Productivity is complex and nuanced, with im-

portant implications for software development teams

(Forsgren et al., 2021). Most research in software

engineering deﬁnes productivity in terms of the rate

of output per unit of input, often time-based (John-

son et al., 2019). However, many factors inﬂuence

software productivity and organizations generally do

not know what these factors are (Canedo and Santos,

2019). There is no consensus on the “right” measure-

ment of productivity. However, one weighty measure

of productivity is personal perception (Forsgren et al.,

2021).

2.1 Related Work

In this section, we explore relevant studies on engage-

ment, satisfaction and productivity of software profes-

sionals.

Panteli et al. (2018) explored work engagement in

virtual teams. The authors investigated work engage-

ment in asynchronous mediated settings and found

practices that foster its development. However, unlike

our work, this study was not carried out in a software

development company, but in a project management

company in the engineering industry.

Wagner and Ruhe (2018) conducted a systematic

review of productivity factors in software develop-

ment. They presented a list of technical and soft fac-

tors that inﬂuence productivity. Soft factors are as-

pects related to human characteristics, such as man-

agement, feedback, communication, and appreciation

for work, whereas technical factors relate to systems

and process engineering, such as programming lan-

guages, tools, hardware, and processes (Canedo and

Santos, 2019; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018).

Based on the list of factors distilled by Wagner and

Ruhe (2018), Storey et al. (2019) performed a study

to understand and measure productivity and job sat-

isfaction. The authors investigated the most signif-

icant soft-technical factors and challenges faced by

ICEIS 2024 - 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Microsoft developers. As a result, they compiled a

categorized list of soft and technical factors that can

affect job satisfaction and productivity.

Our work used the categorization done by Wag-

ner and Ruhe (2018) and Storey et al. (2019). We

used their list of soft and technical factors as a starting

point for our coding process, and followed a bottom-

up process that eventually evolved their list to better

classify our working data set.

Johnson et al. (2019) presented a study to under-

stand which factors, related to the physical work envi-

ronment, affect the satisfaction and perceived produc-

tivity of software engineers who work in company of-

ﬁces. The authors found that working privately with-

out interruption plus team and leaders’ communica-

tion were the most critical factors. Differently from

(Johnson et al., 2019), our work is not focused only

on factors related to the physical work environment.

Franc¸a et al. (2018) carried out multiple case stud-

ies in four software organizations to present a the-

ory of software engineers’ motivation and job satis-

faction. According to the authors, these aspects have

been objects of study in many different ﬁelds for a

long time, but there is still little concern with the

proper use of theories applied to software engineer-

ing (Franc¸a et al., 2018).

Google researchers performed case studies to

identify the importance of managers in teams and

also to characterize what makes effective teams on

Google (Duhigg, 2016; Harrel and Barbato, 2018).

They concluded that leaders play a decisive role in

employee performance, satisfaction, and retention

(Duhigg, 2016). They found ﬁve characteristics to

deﬁne the best teams: psychological safety, reliabil-

ity, structure and clarity, meaning and impact (Har-

rel and Barbato, 2018). Despite the results, the work

of Google researchers can be considered Grey Liter-

ature (GL), as the company reports are not formally

peer-reviewed nor formally published (Garousi et al.,

2019). Our work takes into consideration the GL of

Google reports to assess team related dimensions con-

cerning psychological safety, performance effective-

ness, allocation, and career development.

Engagement and job satisfaction are based on the

subjective practitioners’ perception, and may vary ac-

cording to different contexts, professionals, work en-

vironment and organization. Thus our work seeks to

identify additional factors and observe how they com-

plement previous research. To this end, we present

insights into the experience and opinion of software

engineering professionals from a large governmental

software organization. Although there are studies on

motivation, satisfaction and engagement of software

professionals, this speciﬁc context is still not widely

studied and cultural differences can impact the results

(Franc¸a et al., 2018). Moreover, the participants of

our study work remotely. Software companies are

shifting to remote work, and researchers and compa-

nies are still trying to comprehend the challenges and

factors that affect practitioners’ engagement and sat-

isfaction in such environments. Our results might be

considered as input for comparing what factors affect

remote and on-site work.

3 METHODOLOGY

This section presents the planning of the study consid-

ering its context, posed research questions, data col-

lection and analysis procedures.

3.1 Context

Our study was carried out at the largest state-owned

IT technology company in Latin America. The com-

pany has around 7,700 employees and is spread over

several states of Brazil

. Thus, the survey and partic-

ipants mother language is Portuguese. The study was

carried out in the context of Project Sinergia, which is

being carried out in the company’s software develop-

ment department, aiming to improve employees’ soft

skills. Within the scope of Sinergia, the company ex-

pects to identify improvement opportunities and an-

alyze the evolution and return of the actions imple-

mented. It also foresees a positive impact on the par-

ticipants since the study allows them to know where

they are, get a baseline of their competencies, and

plan personal and team level improvement actions.

3.2 Research Questions

Our survey focuses on understanding factors that af-

fect work engagement and job satisfaction. Thus,

our questionnaire address multiple questions related

to these factors, considering the research background

(Wagner and Ruhe, 2018; Storey et al., 2019), for in-

stance, psychological safety, team effectiveness, per-

formance, allocation, and career development. We

deﬁned the research questions based on the interest

of organizing the understanding of these factors in-

dependently: we tried to capture how each factor

relates to the organization’s central interests for im-

provements in its software quality processes. Hence,

our work has the following research questions:

• RQ1. How is the work engagement in the solution

development teams? This question aims to assess

employee’s engagement at work. It is motivated

by the fact that engagement is related to other

key job factors at the organizational level. For

Data from the Transparency and Governance Portal

Software Engineers Engagement and Job Satisfaction: A Survey with Practitioners Working Remotely in a Public Organization

instance, there is a positive correlation between

engagement and commitment to the job (Vazquez

et al., 2015) and a negative correlation between

engagement and the intention to leave an organi-

zation (Halbesleben and Wheeler, 2008). There

are also possible correlations between engage-

ment and absenteeism, satisfaction, and job per-

formance (Salanova et al., 2005). Our work uses

an adaptation of the Utrecht Work Engagement

Scale (UWES) (Vazquez et al., 2015) to measure

work engagement.

• RQ2. How do solution development teams assess

the dimensions of psychological safety, team ef-

fectiveness, performance, allocation, and career

development? Psychological safety is related to

personal perceptions about the consequences of

taking interpersonal risks in a context such as a

workplace (Edmondson and Lei, 2014). Team ef-

fectiveness encompasses factors such as cohesion

and collaboration, as well as proactive communi-

cation, clear goals, autonomy, and work impact

(Beecham et al., 2008; Sharp et al., 2009; Storey

et al., 2019; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018). The per-

formance dimension intends to evaluate the teams

perceived productivity. The allocation dimension

intends to identify situations of overload or idle-

ness within the team, and plays a critical role in

the success of projects in software engineering

(Costa et al., 2020). And, the career development

dimension intends to assess the perception of fac-

tors such as feedback, career development, and

recognition for work (Beecham et al., 2008; Sharp

et al., 2009). By looking at these dimensions, this

question aims to investigate how people work to-

gether within their teams and the organization it-

self.

• RQ3. How satisﬁed are solution development

team members with their teams? This question

aims to assess the satisfaction of the employees.

Satisfaction refers to pleasurable emotions in re-

action to work and inﬂuences attitudes towards the

organization such as intention to stay and job at-

tendance (Franc¸a et al., 2018). One of the possible

ways to measure satisfaction is to ask employees

how much they would recommend their team to

others (Forsgren et al., 2021).

• RQ4. What factors can be improved in the

work environment? This question aims to identify

points that can contribute to improving the work

environment, productivity, satisfaction, and well-

being of solution development team members. It

works as a proxy to identify critical points of at-

tention at the work environment.

3.3 Survey Instrument

We conduct a survey because productivity dimensions

such as employee satisfaction and well-being are gen-

erally better evaluated with this type of research strat-

egy (Forsgren et al., 2021). The survey encompasses

18 questions based on a Likert scale from 0 to 6 (0 -

Never, 1 - Almost never, 2 - Occasionally, 3 - Regu-

larly, 4 - Frequently, 5 - Almost allways, 6 - Always),

and a question based on a Net Promoter Score (NPS)

scale. NPS is a market research metric that uses a sin-

gle survey question, asking customers to rate the like-

lihood that they would recommend a company, prod-

uct, or a service to a friend or colleague (Bendle et al.,

2019). In our survey, NPS helps to measure how satis-

ﬁed employees are with the company. Finally, with a

open-ended question, the survey totaled 20 questions.

The questionnaire is available in our replication pack-

age (Cerqueira, 2024).

Questions 1 to 6 approach the employee satisfac-

tion dimension. These questions aim to assess the

level of work engagement, considering that there is

a relationship between work engagement and profes-

sional performance (Vazquez et al., 2015). This set

of questions is related to RQ1. Questions 7 to 18 fo-

cus on the dimensions psychological safety, perfor-

mance effectiveness, allocation, and career develop-

ment. This set of questions is related to RQ2 and it

is based on the technical reports of the Aristotle and

Oxygen projects (Duhigg, 2016; Harrel and Barbato,

2018). It aims to assess the relationship among em-

ployees within the working team. Question 19 aims

to answer RQ3 and deﬁnes a team recommendation

assessment to measure employee satisfaction within

the team. It uses an NPS scale ranging from 0 to 10.

Lastly, for answering RQ4, question 20 asks the par-

ticipant what he(she) would do if he(she) had a magic

wand to improve his(her) work environment. It aims

to identify critical points of improvement at the work

environment.

Before applying the survey at large, we piloted

it in an organizational unit of 79 people. Our goal

was to try the survey instrument with members of the

target population of the study. We received 65 an-

swers and got feedback about how much time it took

to complete the task (the mean time was about 12 min-

utes), impressions about questions (e.g. clarity, ease

of understanding, size), and improvement points. We

did not include these responses in the ﬁnal survey re-

sults. We used this information to reﬁne the question-

naire by: (i) improving the survey questions for clarity

and completeness, i.e., internal and construct validity;

and, (ii) reducing the effort required to answer it.

ICEIS 2024 - 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

3.4 Data Collection and Population

We conducted the survey between October 25th and

November 08th of 2021 with employees who worked

remotely in the development of software solutions.

The respondents were from different geographical re-

gions of the country and had working between 10 to

30 years in the organization. They work as managers,

architects, designers, support, and programmers in a

software development department.

The survey application was done synchronously

in virtual meetings. In those meetings, those respon-

sible for the survey explained the purpose of the ques-

tionnaire, and invited the attending employees to par-

ticipate in it. The participation was voluntary, and

those who decided to participate in the survey would

be given 20 minutes to answer the questionnaire. We

invited 225 practitioners to the survey and received

answers from 148 (a 65% success rate). To ensure

anonymity, we refer to survey participants by ID as

, P

, ...P

3.5 Data Analysis Procedures

The survey instrument is composed of a mix of closed

and open-ended questions. Thus, we need to rely on a

variety of procedures for data analysis.

For the analysis of the answers to closed ques-

tions, we relied on descriptive statistics to get a bet-

ter understanding of the data. We used the mode and

median for the central tendency of the ordinal and in-

terval data. For the nominal data, we calculated the

distribution of participants choosing each option.

For the open-ended question, we applied quali-

tative data analysis techniques (Seaman, 1999). We

coded responses to Q20 based on the list of categories

and important technical and soft factors proposed by

Wagner and Ruhe (2018) and Storey et al. (2019) (see

Section 2.1). For instance, we coded the participant

’s response ”I would improve communication. It

is very difﬁcult to get through to the team, they are

always busy”

as Communication in the Team cate-

gory. In another example, we coded P

’s answer ”Get

more feedback from my leaders” as Feedback in the

Management category. The list of categories initially

adopted (Storey et al., 2019; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018)

was eventually evolved as explained latter on in the

paper.

The coding was performed individually by two re-

searchers. Later, the researchers jointly reviewed their

classiﬁcations to reach a consensus on the categoriza-

tion of the data. The results were then discussed with

All answers quoted in this work were translated from

Portuguese.

analysts from the Sinergia Project (organization stake-

holders) to validate the ﬁnal results.

4 RESULTS

The results of the study are presented in the following

subsections.

4.1 RQ1 - How Is the Work

Engagement in the Solution

Development Teams?

Figure 1 presents how participants feel at work. Re-

garding Q1, Q2 and Q3, we can see that most respon-

dents considered themselves full of energy, enthusi-

astic about their work, and feel like going to work.

This points to a deep connection with the work ac-

tivity, characterized by vigor, dedication, concentra-

tion and, therefore, less probability of absences and

employee turnover (Vazquez et al., 2015). Concern-

ing questions Q4, Q5 and Q6, most participants con-

sidered themselves proud and involved in their work,

and also that the “time ﬂies” when they were working.

This denotes a sense of signiﬁcance, inspiration, and

pride in relation to their job (Vazquez et al., 2015).

Lastly, none of the participants answered Never for

questions 1 to 6. Therefore, overall, results indicate

that the participants considered themselves engaged

in their jobs.

Key Finding 1. Overall, participants are

highly engaged in their work.

4.2 RQ2 - How Do Solution

Development Teams Assess the

Dimensions of Psychological Safety,

Team Effectiveness, Performance,

Allocation, and Career

Development?

The dimensions psychological safety, team effective-

ness, performance, allocation, and career develop-

ment are related to job satisfaction (Storey et al.,

2019). Figure 1 presents the responses for each of

those dimensions, from Q7 to Q18. Concerning team

effectiveness (Q8 to Q13) and performance (Q14),

we can see a similar assessment by the majority of

participants. Participants are satisﬁed with the team’s

interaction regarding commitment, problem-solving,

work complexity, impactful work, autonomy, and

Software Engineers Engagement and Job Satisfaction: A Survey with Practitioners Working Remotely in a Public Organization

Figure 1: Survey responses.

collaboration. The respondents showed more con-

cerns regarding communication (Q9) and team’s goals

(Q10), still less than 20% answered Never, Almost

Never or Occasionally to those questions.

Psychological safety (Q7) and allocation (Q15)

are also positively seen by participants. Google re-

searchers found psychological safety to be the most

signiﬁcant factor for team’s success, and establishing

psychologically safe environments as essential to the

organization (Duhigg, 2016). As software team build-

ing is an important project management activity, the

right team size is critical to avoid allocation overhead

issues (Costa et al., 2020).

Career development (Q16 to Q18) caused the

most concern within the teams. The responses Never,

Almost Never or Occasionally are around 40% of the

total answers for Q17. Previous studies have pointed

to the importance of the manager showing appreci-

ation and giving good feedback about the work, as

well as to the need for good communication within

the team (Storey et al., 2019; Beecham et al., 2008;

Duhigg, 2016; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018).

Key Finding 2. Clear career development

practices are a central concern when evaluat-

ing job satisfaction.

4.3 RQ3 - How Satisﬁed Are Solution

Development Team Members with

Their Teams?

Figure 2 shows the participants’ evaluation for Q19

(How highly would you recommend your team (your

division) to a friend to work in it?): 63% answered

yes, 26% were neutral, and 11% would not recom-

mend. Later on, when collecting feedback on the sur-

vey, we found out that one important contributing fac-

tor to the neutral and non-recommending responses

was the type of work. Many participants answered

”do not recommend” or ”neutral” not because of their

team or their manager, but because of work-related is-

sues such as working with old technologies and legacy

systems, and using bureaucratic workﬂows.

Figure 2: Participants’ recommendation of the solution de-

velopment teams.

Key Finding 3. Overall, participants are sat-

isﬁed with their teams. However, technical

factors (e.g., use of old technologies, work on

legacy systems, and using bureaucratic work-

ﬂows) can play an important role in not rec-

ommend their team to a friend to work in it.

4.4 RQ4 - What Factors Can Be

Improved in the Work

Environment?

Among the 148 participants, 61 did not answer the

open-ended question and six of them reported being

satisﬁed with the work environment and did not see

any need of improvement (e.g., P

answered ”Any-

thing. Perfect. Best team I worked”). Thus, we coded

the answers from 81 participants. We found 28 soft

and two technical factors.

4.4.1 Soft Factors

These are factors related to human aspects. Table 1

shows the coded categories and soft factors. Team

(29), Management (22), and Rewards, Beneﬁts, and

Career (15) are among the most cited categories. The

value in parentheses is relative to the frequency of

each category and coded factor.

ICEIS 2024 - 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Key ﬁnding 4. Soft skills related to Team,

Management, and Rewards, Beneﬁts and Ca-

reer look determinant to improve work envi-

ronment.

Team. Responses in this category are linked to team

improvements. Communication (13) and social inter-

actions (5) stand out as the most mentioned. Partici-

pants also mentioned psychological safety (3), collab-

oration (3), skilled co-workers (2), team culture (2)

and innovation support (1) as factors that need im-

provement.

Communication (13) concerns the degree and ef-

ﬁciency with which information ﬂows in the team

(Wagner and Ruhe, 2018; Forsgren et al., 2021). For

instance, P

reported that ”less aggressive and more

empathetic communication”. The organization must

intensify the adoption of good practices to maintain a

communication ﬂow between team members as this

factor can be correlated to the success of a project

and have a positive impact on productivity (Wagner

and Ruhe, 2018). Ensuring access to tools, infras-

tructure, and organizational resources, besides, keep-

ing communication channels open, sharing essential

work information, and a space for informal talks are

fundamental communication strategies for companies

(Johnson et al., 2019; Ju

arez-Ram

ırez et al., 2021;

Miller et al., 2021).

The social interactions (5) factor concerns inter-

actions, events and social connections between team

members (Miller et al., 2021). For instance, P

re-

ported that ”I would promote get-togethers in order

to celebrate the team’s results and foster the team’s

proximity”. Three participants mentioned the factor

psychological safety, which we questioned in Q7. As

we can see in Figure 1, some respondents (approxi-

mately 21%) think that almost never, occasionally or

regularly team members feel they can fail or speak out

without feeling inhibited or pressured.

Management. In this category, factors refer to the

team manager roles. It includes factors such as meet-

ing planning (5), feedback (5), clear priorities (4),

appreciation shown for work (3), autonomy (3), and

well-deﬁned goals (2), as reported by P

116

: ”I would

seek more equity in the tasks valuation”.

As for the meeting planning (5) factor, responses

mentioned problems in the proper planning of meet-

ings. This factor had not been previously listed as

an important factor for productivity by (Storey et al.,

2019; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018), however the par-

ticipants of our survey mentioned the need for bet-

ter planning and organization of meetings to better

use their time. Too many meetings or poorly con-

ducted meetings can become a waste of time and a

challenge for developer productivity (Beecham et al.,

2008; Ju

arez-Ram

ırez et al., 2021).

Managers can be essential for making clear de-

cisions and facilitating collaboration between teams,

being decisive for the performance and efﬁciency of

employees (Harrel and Barbato, 2018). They must

understand and be able to provide feedback to beneﬁt

their engineers (Storey et al., 2019).

The feedback (5) factor relates to giving informa-

tion about performance effectiveness. Software engi-

neers suffer from a low level of feedback, while di-

rect and immediate evaluation contributes to under-

standing work results and building a self-perception

of their actual performance (Beecham et al., 2008;

Franc¸a et al., 2018). This is aligned with answers

of some participants for questions Q16 and Q18, in

which they indicated never, almost never or occa-

sionally for receiving feedback and for recognition for

their work (see Figure 1). For example, P

reported

that he(she) wanted to ”Get more feedback from my

leaders”.

Rewards, Beneﬁts, Career. In this category, we have

factors such as lateral move opportunities (6) and ben-

eﬁts (4). For instance, P

responded that ”An ac-

knowledgment or award individually linked to a re-

sult / delivery of value, and not linked to a speciﬁc

deadline”. In general, the participants consider that

there should be more opportunities to change projects

or teams.

Participants also mentioned the need of improve-

ments related to salary (3) and career promotions (2).

This shows that some participants also want more

equity in the distribution of promotions and salary

progression. When considering these challenges,

managers can propose alternative incentive strategies,

such as useful knowledge as a reward (Franc¸a et al.,

2018).

Individual Skills and Experiences. In this category,

we coded two responses as a personality (2) factor.

They mentioned conﬂicts between different tempera-

ments in the team. P

, for example, reported that ”I

would make with a colleague of mine that, if he did

not have ’personal nitpicking’, that person would be

my friend...”. The combination of different temper-

aments and personalities can affect the performance

and satisfaction of team members, being important for

good coexistence, communication, collaboration and

psychological safety of the team Wagner and Ruhe

(2018).

Organization. We coded responses that mention the

vision (3) factor in this category. This relates to the

organizational vision and culture (Wagner and Ruhe,

2018). Employees must understand the culture and

organizational vision (Storey et al., 2019). P

, for

example, mentioned ”Have a broader view of the de-

partment’s performance in the global context of the

organization”.

Software Engineers Engagement and Job Satisfaction: A Survey with Practitioners Working Remotely in a Public Organization

Personal Productivity. In this category, we coded

two responses as ability to achieve goals (1) and per-

ceived productivity (1), which are related to achieving

goals and considering themselves productive within

the company (Sharp et al., 2009).

Project. We coded the six responses, all related to

the team size factor, in this category. For instance,

mentioned ”To increase team size”. These an-

swers suggest the need to re-evaluate the number of

people in the team, possibly reallocating people, in-

creasing teams, or evaluating their workload (Costa

et al., 2020; Wagner and Ruhe, 2018).

Training. In this category, we coded responses re-

lated to the training factor (6). Participants mentioned

that they would like more training. For instance, P

said ”I would seek training for myself and the team in

skills and competencies that today are seen as gaps”).

It is critical that software engineers can broaden their

skills, specialize in the domain of tools and technolo-

gies, and also widen their soft skills (Storey et al.,

2019).

Work Life/Work Experience. In this category, we

found the factor time to complete tasks (7), as exem-

pliﬁed by P

in ”I would assign tasks with deadlines

suited to the capacity of the team”. It is important

that software engineers have enough time to complete

their tasks and to learn how to carry out their activities

(Storey et al., 2019).

Work Type/Impact. Some job complexity factors

can affect job performance and well-being, as it can

increase satisfaction by challenging software engi-

neers (Storey et al., 2019). However, the company

must balance the complexity and the time available to

complete the tasks. We coded three responses as work

complexity because they mentioned the need for more

variety, signiﬁcance and complexity. For instance,

123

mentioned that ”Find challenging activities for

the team”.

Key Finding 5. We identiﬁed two new fac-

tors that can contribute to improving the work

environment: (appropriate) meeting planning

and (promote) social interactions.

Working Environment. Regarding this category, we

coded the factors proximity to team (5), physical en-

vironment (2), and e-factor (1). We classiﬁed as prox-

imity to team answers that mention the distance and

lack of contact with team members due to the social

isolation caused by the pandemic. For instance, P

reported ”Currently, just putting an end to the pan-

demic to go back to the ofﬁce...”. Johnson et al. (2019)

noticed that for some software engineers, team prox-

imity is signiﬁcant, as perceived productivity and sat-

isfaction can increase when the people they work with

are in close proximity. Due to the collaborative na-

ture of software development, the ability to informally

sense if someone is available to initiate a discussion

can facilitate many tasks (Johnson et al., 2019).

Key Finding 6. The soft factors communi-

cation, (appropriate) time to complete tasks,

lateral moving opportunities, training, team

size, (culture of providing) feedback, (appro-

priate) meeting planning, (promote) social

interactions, and proximity to team are fre-

quently seen as factors that can contribute to

improving the work environment, productiv-

ity, satisfaction, and well-being of software

practitioners.

E-factor is related to work interruptions. Software

engineers may feel less satisﬁed or less productive

with their work depending on how many interruptions

and context changes they face (Wagner and Ruhe,

2018). Interruptions can occur in shared physical

work environments (colleagues talking, telephone, of-

ﬁce noise) as well as in remote work (family, children,

pets, ambient noise), and can delay the work progress

(Beecham et al., 2008; Johnson et al., 2019). Working

in privacy without interruption is a major factor in sat-

isfaction with the work environment (Johnson et al.,

2019). Therefore, some software engineers prefer to

work in private spaces (Storey et al., 2019). However,

the ability to communicate and work collaboratively

is also valued. Hence managers and leaders must bal-

ance the need for individual privacy with the need for

team communication.

4.4.2 Technical Factors

The close-ended questions did not initially foresee

the answers in this category. However, some partic-

ipants pointed out the need for improvements in tech-

nical factors too. We coded four responses in the pro-

cesses and systems category, as hardware (3) and tools

(1) factors. Some participants were concerned with

access to better and more up-to-date equipment and

tools. As an example, P

133

mentioned that ”I would

always have the most up-to-date equipment, acces-

sories and all possible tools.”. These resources also

can impact job satisfaction and productivity (Canedo

and Santos, 2019; Storey et al., 2019).

4.5 Follow up Meetings with Company

Analysts

We held some meetings with company analysts of the

Sinergia Project who planned the questionnaire. We

ICEIS 2024 - 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

use their feedback to validate the results of the qual-

itative analysis. We presented the coded factors and

discussed our interpretation with them.

When evaluating the results, the experience of the

analysts was crucial for an accurate interpretation.

For instance, they observed that participants would

not recommend their team to a friend (see RQ3 on

Section 4.3) because of issues related to the type of

work such as obsolete technology, legacy system, and

bureaucratic workﬂow. In another example, regarding

the interpretation of the communication issues men-

tioned by participants, at ﬁrst, we assumed it could be

related to the proximity to team. However, accord-

ing to the analysts’ experience, it was not the case.

In fact, the reported problems could also affect onsite

work teams as well. Results presented in subsection

4.4 already consider the results of follow up meetings.

Table 1: Soft factors that can be improved, according to

survey participants.

Category Factor N

Individual skills and experiences(2) Personality 2

Management (22)

Well-deﬁned goals 2

Appreciation shown for

work

Autonomy 3

Clear priorities 4

Feedback 5

Meeting planning 5

Organization (3) Vision 3

Personal productivity (2)

Ability to achieve goals 1

Perceived productivity 1

Project (6) Team size 6

Rewards, beneﬁts, and career (15)

Promotion 2

Salary 3

Beneﬁts 4

Lateral move opportunities 6

Team(29)

Team culture 2

Collaborative team 3

Social interactions 5

Communication 13

Psychological safety 3

Support for innovation 1

Skilled co-workers 2

Training (6) 6

Work life/work experience (7) Time to complete tasks 7

Work type/impact (3) Work complexity (3) 3

Work environment (8)

Proximity to team 5

Physical working environ-

ment

e-factor 1

5 DISCUSSION

In this study, we present the assessment of work en-

gagement and job satisfaction by software profes-

sionals working remotely in a large governmental

software organization. Considering the practitioners

perspective, we highlight career development, psy-

chological safety, team management and rewards,

beneﬁts, meeting planning, and social interaction

as important factors requiring more attention from

similar organizations aiming at job satisfaction (Sec-

tion 5.1). Considering the researchers perspective, we

highlight the need to explore: i) meeting planning

and social interactions as new factors building on

the factors originally listed by Storey et al. (2019)

and Wagner and Ruhe (2018) (Section 5.3), ii) the

importance of considering different approaches to in-

vestigate work engagement and job satisfaction (Sec-

tion 5.2), iii) different organizational and cultural con-

texts to build a broader base of empirical knowledge

on work motivation and job satisfaction (Section 5.4),

and iv) the strengthening of partnerships between the

industry and academia to study the subject (Section

5.4).

5.1 Revisiting the Research Questions

Concerning work engagement (RQ1), the survey par-

ticipants showed a deep connection with work activ-

ity and also a sense of signiﬁcance and pride in rela-

tion to their job. Regarding job satisfaction (RQ2),

the participants assigned most negative scores to the

following dimensions: career development (feed-

back, career development and appreciation for work),

allocation, and psychological safety. In the open-

ended questions, most of the respondents mentioned

the categories team, management and rewards, ben-

eﬁts and career as points that should be improved.

Hence we understand that the participants are more

concerned with these categories and dimensions, re-

quiring more signiﬁcant attention from the organiza-

tion to improve them.

Even so, when asked if they would recommend

their team to a friend to work on it, 63% of the re-

spondents would recommend it (RQ3).

5.2 Relating the Open-Ended and

Closed Questions

Despite the high level of engagement and satisfac-

tion observed in the self-reported questionnaire, we

found signiﬁcant factors reported as impacting em-

ployee satisfaction after coding the open-ended re-

sponses to RQ4 (see Section 4.4). We compared

the open-ended responses with the closed-ended re-

Software Engineers Engagement and Job Satisfaction: A Survey with Practitioners Working Remotely in a Public Organization

sponses of each participant. For instance, communi-

cation was the most mentioned factor in open-ended

responses as a point to be improved. However, Fig-

ure 1 shows that 88% of the participants considered

that team members frequently, almost always, or al-

ways, communicate with each other. We observed

that even after positively evaluating the dimensions in

the closed questionnaire, the respondents reinforced

the need for improvements, pointing out the factors

categorized in subsection 4.4. For responses coded

as communication factor, we analyzed how the par-

ticipants rated Q9. When problems or delays oc-

cur, team members proactively communicate with

each other and commit to the solution. We found

that, among these respondents, all of them rated Q9

positively. The same happened with participants who

mentioned the factors psychological safety and well-

deﬁned goals in comparison to Q7. I notice that

team members feel they can fail or speak out with-

out feeling inhibited or pressured and Q10. I notice

that team members know what the team’s goals

are.

Thus, we considered that the open-ended ques-

tion, asking the participants what they would do with

a magic wand (Q20), encouraged the creativity and

critical thinking of the respondents. This allowed a

deeper understanding of the aspects evaluated in the

survey and the surfacing of ideas that were not ini-

tially foreseen in the closed questions.

5.3 Additional Factors Considered by

the Participants

We consider the classiﬁcations of Storey et al. (2019)

and Wagner and Ruhe (2018) as an extensive list of

factors impacting satisfaction and productivity. How-

ever, we found two additional factors that were not

considered by Storey et al. (2019) and Wagner and

Ruhe (2018) as important to job satisfaction. We

added the meeting planning factor in the manage-

ment category and social interactions in the team cat-

egory. Five participants of our survey mentioned the

need for better planning and organization of meetings.

Social interactions was the second most mentioned

factor in the team category, also pointed by ﬁve re-

spondents. They wanted more interactions, events and

social connections between team members.

Improper meeting planning can be a waste of

time and a challenge for developers (Beecham et al.,

2008; Ju

arez-Ram

ırez et al., 2021), potentially im-

pacting in productivity. Missing social interactions

can affect connection and interpersonal communica-

tion with team members, impacting developers pro-

ductivity (Miller et al., 2021). We recommend that

these two factors should be considered by future

works that address job satisfaction of software prac-

titioners. The company analysts also considered these

ﬁndings as a relevant contribution to their organiza-

tion, since they had not perceived them before.

5.4 Implications for Researchers

Franc¸a et al. (2018) consider that there are few stud-

ies on work motivation and job satisfaction in soft-

ware engineering and they are still concentrate on de-

veloped countries. Thus, aspects such as the cultural

difference concerning the reality of different cultures

are also not widely understood. We consider that the

results presented in this work are little explored and

there is still a gap for further investigation. Consid-

ering the factors that affect job satisfaction and pro-

ductivity proposed by Storey et al. (2019) and Wag-

ner and Ruhe (2018), our survey appointed two new

factors (meeting planning and social interactions).

This result represents a contribution for researchers.

In our work, we used NPS to measure how satis-

ﬁed are team members with their teams (see section

3.3). Bendle et al. (2019) emphasize the value of aca-

demic partnership with practitioners to achieve rele-

vant and robust research regarding the use of NPS.

Our survey shows how it can be used to assess practi-

tioners’ satisfaction with their teams.

Another important aspect of our study is the

partnership between software industry and academia,

since ﬁeld research addressing human factors in the

software industry is still rising, specially in develop-

ing countries (Cerqueira et al., 2022).

There are relationships between the identiﬁed fac-

tors that lends itself for further research. For instance,

feedback and psychological safety are related to com-

munication, as well as personality and social inter-

actions (DeFranco and Laplante, 2017; Miller et al.,

2021). Communication was the most mentioned fac-

tor by the participants, who pointed out the need for

better communication, empathy development, reduc-

ing aggressive behaviors and improving socialization

among team members. There is a broad need for soft-

ware engineering research focused on team commu-

nication (DeFranco and Laplante, 2017). But in par-

ticular, we highlight the need to deepen the research

to understand and measure how skills and behaviors

related to communication affect teamwork, satisfac-

tion and engagement of software practitioners. Future

work can use our results to compare how remote and

onsite work affect job satisfaction.

ICEIS 2024 - 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Figure 3: Work improvement frame.

6 THREATS TO VALIDITY

There are some threats to validity in this work, as with

any other empirical study. Below, we discuss the most

relevant threats to our study.

Conclusion Validity. A threat arises from the quali-

tative analysis because it is subjective and subject to

inconsistencies. We used this analysis to answer RQ4.

To mitigate this threat, two researchers individually

analyzed and coded all open-ended questions. Later,

they compared and reﬁned their results until reaching

consensus. Finally, results of the qualitative analysis

were presented and discussed with the professionals

for validation.

Construct Validity. Overall, participants may, based

on the fact that they are part of a study, act differ-

ently than they do otherwise. To help prevent hy-

pothesis guessing and evaluation apprehension, in the

invitation e-mail, we clearly explain the purpose of

the study and ask the participants to answer ques-

tions based on their own experience. The question-

naire is anonymous and that the collected data is an-

alyzed without taking into consideration the partici-

pants’ identities.

Internal Validity. As the survey questions were

answered remotely, the participants could misunder-

stand these questions, arising an internal threat af-

fect our study. To mitigate it, the survey passed

through internal reviews conducted by experienced

researchers. Afterwards, we piloted the survey with

79 employees to assess the survey questions, struc-

ture, and duration. We decided to shorten the ques-

tionnaire after validation of the pilot study.

External Validity. The company we studied employs

around 7,700 people, working on software products

for the government. Our results likely generalize

more to the context of large public software compa-

nies than to small, private or open-source organiza-

tions. Hence, we do not claim that our results are

generalizable for general contexts. However, an argu-

ment can be made that the ecological validity Andrade

(2018) of the work, i.e., the extent to which these ﬁnd-

ings approximate other real-world scenarios, is likely

to hold in other settings.

7 CONCLUSION

This work investigates the work engagement and job

satisfaction of software practitioners working in a re-

mote environment. The study is based on a survey

carried out at a large governmental software organi-

zation. In total, 148 software professionals answered

the survey.

Results reveal that career development, psycho-

logical safety, team, management and rewards,

beneﬁts, meeting planning and social interactions

are factors that organizations need to pay more at-

tention, because they affect the satisfaction of soft-

ware professionals. These factors can change depend-

ing on the context, organization, characteristics of the

teams and work environment (Canedo and Santos,

2019). We also found that meeting planning and so-

cial interactions are factors that should be considered

by studies addressing job satisfaction. These factors

were not previously identiﬁed by the studies of Storey

et al. (2019); Wagner and Ruhe (2018).

The results of this work can directly beneﬁt prac-

titioners, since the leveraged skills provide empirical

reference for improving work environments. We sum-

marized the most commonly mentioned of these skills

in a cheat sheet presented in Figure 3. The proposi-

tion of interventions and improvements for the factors

identiﬁed in our analysis is subject to future work.

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ICEIS 2024 - 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems