1. Introduction
Employees in the workplace spend most of their day working in an office, conducting tasks including writing, reading, making phone calls, and holding online meetings with colleagues. Whether they are working at home or in an office, employees should be provided with a safe, clean, and pleasant working environment. Previous research has proven that the relationships between the circumstances on the inside of a building, human health, and well-being are complex [
1].
Working conditions refer to the physical and mental aspects of an employee’s working environment and the employee’s relationship with the company’s overall culture [
2]. It was crucial role in ensuring employees’ well-being and the businesses’ success. Therefore, the government relies on studies of working conditions to formulate and implement new policies and choices affecting workers. It is no secret that physical hazards in the workplace contribute to an already high rate of injuries sustained in the workplace.
Previous studies have indicated that there is a significant correlation between an encouraging work environment and the development of work environment-oriented behaviors [
3]. Determining appropriate workplace strategies requires taking into consideration managerial approaches and the social behaviors of employees because each company has a different unique culture and set of values that have developed over time. Therefore, employees should play an essential role in delivering the company’s vision to reality, especially in achieving corporate sustainability [
4]. Employees perform an essential role within the company which tends to promote common practices in social exchanges by trading solutions and technical assistance with one another. They will be more likely to more effectively implement environmental issues in the workplace [
5,
6]. As a result, the workplace has the potential to serve as a reference indicator in the process of achieving sustainable business practices. Implementing this support leads to the retention of social sustainability in the workplace [
7]. For effective implementation, it is necessary to determine the company’s fundamental issues.
Regarding the Sustainable Development Goals 2020, Indonesia is 82nd worldwide [
8]. Indonesia has established several regulations to enhance each index. However, the issue with this index remains and is becoming stronger. The government realizes that achieving a sustainable Indonesia requires a strategy that builds economic expansion and addresses social needs such as education, well-being, equality, and work opportunities through integrated SDGs. All participating countries have committed to accelerating the progress process for underdeveloped countries through the commitment not to leave anyone behind.
Issues related to Indonesia’s Sustainability are issues that are very close to the community, including companies. The SDGs provide new challenges for companies through a framework guide published as a company guide to support businesses in mitigating their SDGs challenges as corporate sustainability [
9]. Corporate sustainability often describes how an organization approaches long-term added value in the social, environmental, and economic fields while promoting greater responsibility [
10]. In other words, corporate sustainability can be interpreted as an effort to pursue sustainable corporate development in the economic, social and environmental fields [
11]. These three areas as the triple bottom line, which is used as a reference and has been determined to help the company through cost reductions, better reputation and position in the market, among other aspects [
12]. Employees can improve corporate sustainability through their behaviors, who have stated that this is a crucial factor. When evaluating an organization’s social sustainability, it is important to consider the impact on internal stakeholders, i.e., employees in the workplace [
13].
There are few studies related to demography and workplace social sustainability. Therefore, it is important to incorporate and apply research results that focus on workers’ contributions to social sustainability. Compared to other industries, manufacturing and service have a relatively limited study on their employees. In particular, the focus is on quantitative analyses of the sustainability context carried out by implementing workplace social sustainability and employee perceptions. Through this study, companies can contribute to realizing the 3rd and 5th SDGs related to good health and well-being: gender equality. Improving health and well-being in the workplace requires getting employees more involved in making decisions and ensuring employees are dedicated to the organization’s objectives [
14].
Researchers in organizational behavior have been more interested in supporting the workplace because of its numerous potential benefits on individuals’ long-term health and well-being [
15]. According to [
16], “human sustainability” refers to management strategies that have a long-term positive impact on workers’ physical and mental health [
17]. Employees’ well-being and sustainable performance are becoming essential concerns for the sustainable development of organizations [
18,
19,
20]. Employee well-being is one of the dimensions that support the realization of sustainability [
21,
22]. In addition, workplace comfort [
23,
24,
25], concerns about safety [
26], musculoskeletal health [
27], as well as environmental considerations [
28] also encourage workplace social sustainability. However, other things that need to be studied further have not been studied.
Researchers have been challenged with the difficulty of organizing identities’ nebulous character. Demographics may characterize the qualities of an individual that are thought or known to correlate with particular outcomes, according to the research. Frequently, these factors may change when a person gains a better awareness of themselves. In some instances, demographics are predictors of interest in and of themselves. In other cases, they serve as crucial control variables that better understand the link between other predictor factors and the dependent variable of interest. Using demographic characteristics allows the researcher to pose and explore investigational inquiries with more specificity [
29].
This study aims to identify employee perceptions of workplace social sustainability. Discriminant analysis between dimensions was also performed to further emphasize the future requirements of businesses in the manufacturing and service sectors. In addition, the discussion should take into consideration previous investigations for theoretical purposes. It will strengthen the recommendations that arise from the study by addressing methodological limitations that cannot be examined using data. Each dimension used to determine the social sustainability index can be classified based on the importance of the employee. The present research aims to answer the following questions: How do employees perceive the importance level of workplace social sustainability dimensions? What are the discriminatory indicators of dimensions based on employee perception to classify employee perceived?
3. Methods
The participants in this study were enrolled Indonesian employees. Purposive sampling was explicitly utilized for manufacturing and service industry employees in Indonesia. It is a suitable sampling approach for specific conditions. For measuring a population that is challenging to access, purposive sampling is the most commonly used method. A questionnaire was developed, and employees with at least one year of experience were allowed to participate via online questionnaires. The participant ranked the importance of each indicator on a five-point Likert scale. This study used a cross-sectional survey approach to obtain data from possible respondents via questionnaires administered simultaneously to one participant type [
60]. The discriminate analysis determined the discriminant function among analytical approaches.
All the online surveys we released had informed consent clauses that notified participants that their replies were anonymous and that they may check out at any time. The employee accepted to participate in the study after being assured that the results would be aggregated and kept anonymous. Each participant was provided with a unique link that may be shared with colleagues who consented to do the survey. The online questionnaire contained a subject’s personal statement and a phone number where participants may contact researchers with follow-up inquiries. This study’s participants were not paid for their time. We assume characteristics of the Indonesian working population based on our findings because our sampling method is non-probability sampling. The online survey links made it impossible to determine a sample size before data collection.
A total of 897 participants were included in the survey, whereas a loss rate of 28.3% was predicted. The final survey was carried out, and 643 Indonesian employee participants responded. The main objective of the discriminant analysis was to evaluate the connection between a single non-metric (categorical) dependent variable and a group of independent metric variables in this general form:
where
= discriminant score of discriminant function for object ;
= intercept;
= discriminant coefficient for independent variable ;
= independent variable for object .
Discriminant analysis is often used when the main objective is to determine the group to which an element, for example, person, movie, or product belongs. In each case, the object’s group membership is determined by independent factors chosen by the researcher.
4. Results and Discussion
This section begins by gathering data to support the relevant social sustainability indicators in the workplace associated with ergonomics from the previous research. All analyses were performed with statistics software. Furthermore, mean item scores and standard deviations were computed for each scale to describe workplace social sustainability. Finally, a multivariate technique was employed to explore demography differences. The design of this study was ideally suited to the type of analysis.
According to the questionnaire distribution, 58% of the participants were male; 61% were between the ages of 25 and 34, 16% were between the ages of 18 and 24, and 17% were between the ages of 35 and 44. After that, 6% said they were between the ages of 45 and 54, and 1% said they were 65 or older (55 years and over). A total of 76% had completed college or above, and 18% had completed graduate school. Regarding the industrial sector, 44% of participants were employed in the quinary, 32% in the secondary, and 12% in the quaternary sectors. The participant profiles are presented in
Table 2. The independent or discriminant variables determined various aspects of the demography that were expected to differ, including gender, industry sector, age, education level, and types of industry. A major proportion of the companies were from the manufacturing and service sectors.
Table 3 displays the participants’ descriptive data. The output shows the distribution of observations within gender, industry sector, age, education level, and industry type.
Table 4 shows the test of equality of group means. The test compares five group dimensions of each demography. Each demography has a different result of significant group differences. For example, we did see group differences in workplace comfort based on gender. In addition to using the considerations of tests of equality of group means, Box’s M Test is also used as one of the considerations in discriminant analysis. On the gender aspect, the
p-value did not meet the statistical procedure assumption, therefore, we would not maintain the null hypothesis that there is no equality of variance-covariance matrices; our assumption was not matched. Meanwhile, Box’s M test results for the industry sector aspect based on
p-value were not significant. It is a good thing because it meets the assumption of the statistical procedure. Consequently, we would maintain the null hypothesis that there is equality of variance-covariance matrices, and then our assumption is a match.
Table 5 shows the Box’s M test results for all demography aspects.
Regarding the discriminant function’s strength (
Table 6), this analysis could be represented by several significant statistics. Based on gender, the eigenvalue (0.042) measures the total variance in the discriminant variables S. Furthermore, the canonical correlation (0.201) is equivalent to Pearson’s correlation r, in that the value represents how closely the discriminant function and the dependent variable are related to one another. According to the test function, there was a significant relationship between our discrimination functions and the grouping variable.
According to the equality test of group means, not all demographic variables were significantly different. When industry sector and types of industry were considered, there were differences in the importance of the dimensions of safety concerns, musculoskeletal health, and environmental concerns. Meanwhile, gender significantly differed in terms of workplace comfort and environmental concerns. Because this function was significant, we would want to name that particular function for gender, industry sector, and types of industry. Due to several considerations, age and education level were not considered in determining the discriminant function. The age aspect dominates, where the correlation value ranged from 0.248 to 0.729. We could not create a name to capture the information associated with the predictor variables.
Table 7 shows the correlations between discriminating variables and standardized canonical discriminant functions.
Based on the discriminant analysis, there is a similarity in point of view based on demographic aspects. There are differences in the level of importance based on gender aspects related to workplace comfort. Naming is done based on the dimensions with the most significant correlation. The gender aspect correlates with 0.727 on the dimensions of workplace comfort. Thus, the name of the function is workplace comfort-mindedness. Likewise, for the dimensions of the industry sector and industry type, the two dimensions have the most significant similarity in correlation values, respectively, 0.736 and 0.885, so both dimensions are named safety concerns mindedness functions.
The discriminant analysis results show that gender, industry sector, and type of industry have different preferences based on the survey results in this study. These differences can be analyzed based on the data functions at the group centroid, which are presented in
Table 8. The multivariate test results show that from the aspect of gender, the importance of workplace comfort for females is higher than for males. The primary industry and the manufacturing industry are more concerned with safety concerns.
The post-discriminant analysis classification showed that employees were accurately classified by 57.4% for gender and 61.0% for the type of industry (see
Table 9). When gender and industry sectors were considered, there were differences in the importance of safety concerns and workplace comfort dimensions. Meanwhile, the industry type was significant in terms of safety concerns.
This study identifies the perceptions of Indonesian employees on the dimensions of workplace social sustainability based on demographic aspects. Based on the study’s results, three of the five demographic aspects had a significant effect. The results show that gender, types of industry, and industry sectors affect the level of employee perceptions of the dimensions of workplace sustainability.
Gender issues are essential in sustainability, interpreted as a role formed by society and behavior embedded through the socialization process. Gender is emerging as the primary social construct that mediates interpersonal relationships [
61]. Based on the 5th SDGs, gender equality is the most important aspect of developing a strategy to benefit society [
8]. The study’s findings indicate that gender equality is important in workplace social sustainability planning. Differences in preferences are significant in several aspects of social sustainability, particularly workplace comfort and environmental concerns. Other aspects of gender equality that must be considered in sustainable development include employment, health, education, and rights [
62]. It is a positive contribution to increasing economic complexity. Based on gender aspect, employee expectations influenced comfort and adaptive behavior positively. Understanding workplace expectations requires cognitive mechanisms, including self-efficacy, attitudes, personal norms, perceived control, and thermal history [
63]. The findings could affect how workplaces are designed as they provide options for adaptation to improve social sustainability. By focusing on workplace comfort and environmental concerns, we can help the employees by improving gender equality.
Regarding the analysis in the field of social sustainability, this study enriches the empirical research of the manufacturing and service industries. The study found that various types of industries have different priorities when it comes to sustainable development, particularly regarding workplace social sustainability. The three dimensions of safety concerns, musculoskeletal health, and environmental concerns differ significantly when taken into consideration according to employee preferences. Some researchers examine corporate sustainability management at three levels: normative, strategic, and operational [
64]. A successful operational management system enables a company to maintain its dimension according to the types of industry, manufacturing, or services industry. In contrast to companies in manufacturing or production, the service sector is still developing sustainability as an implementation strategy [
65], particularly in countries like Indonesia.
Depending on the industry sector, employees also have different preferences regarding safety concerns, musculoskeletal health, and environmental considerations. Safety concerns are an absolute consideration for application in various industry sectors [
66]. Safety performance affects employee well-being by ensuring that regulations are followed and improved long-term performance results directly [
67]. Meanwhile, when viewed from the types of industry and industry sectors, there are different perceptions regarding the fulfillment of safety aspects in manufacturing or service companies or from the primary to quinary sectors. However, safety concerns remain the top priority for employees. It can be shown by the results of the discriminant equation produced in
Table 7, where the dimensions of safety concerns have the most significant correlation when viewed from the types of industry and industry sectors.
According to the industry sector, the investigation of personal characteristics indicated statistically significant correlations between this kind of situation and the occupation of the employees [
68]. This finding reinforces previous research where the dimensions of safety concerns are the main considerations that companies must consider. Social sustainability can be achieved by focusing on safety issues in the workplace. However, this aspect’s classification results cannot be considered because the percentage needs to be higher. All employees have the same perception of the demographic aspects of age and education level. Preferences for the five dimensions of social sustainability in the workplace are easier to identify without age, education level, and industry sector consideration.
The employee preferences based on demographics regarding age and educational background have similar results. The point of view on workplace social sustainability is the same. On the other hand, organizations frequently hold stereotypes about age differences in environmental sustainability [
69]. It is consistent when compared with previous research. When regarded from an organizational perspective, the influence of age is negligible. The company’s support for realizing corporate sustainability is needed by maintaining good relations between employees and the company by meeting employee expectations. Thus, the company’s social responsibility does not only focus on shareholders but also on all stakeholders, including employees [
70]. Social sustainability is more difficult to achieve than environmental and economic sustainability [
13,
35,
71]. Therefore, social sustainability is a unique concept.
This study aimed to understand the social dimension of sustainability by exploring how employees perceive the social dimension of sustainability according to their preferences. In general, gender and types of industry must be considered further, especially when the company deploys its strategic objectives of the company. Even though age and educational level have similar perceptions, these two demographic aspects must still be a concern to meet employee expectations. Identifying the preferences across all genders and types of industries may be relevant in further research. Demographic personal characteristics will influence an organization’s potential to achieve workplace social sustainability. It would be worthwhile to characterize the geographical diversity of the employees surveyed to a greater extent (region, size of the city, etc.) because these factors may affect employee perceptions of the issues surveyed. Future research will take the mentioned limitations into consideration. Finally, the results from our study in Indonesia may differ from those from other countries worldwide.