Sensible Leaders and Hybrid Working: Challenges for Talent Management

Abstract

Talent Management (TM) was affected by unprecedented disruptions unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the workplace. The sequential periods of international lockdown, in many cases, forced activities to be redirected for a blended or hybrid form of teleworking. Spatial mobility impacted on the performance of the TM. The impacts have been so deep and widespread that organizations had to adapt to crises using intensive Information and Communicating Technologies (ICT). Hybrid Work (HW) is a modality that became more usual after several COVID-19 waves and lockdowns. In this context, Talent Management depend on sensible leader’s capabilities to attract, maintain, develop, and retain talents to strengthen organizational performance, productivity, and competitiveness, mainly in HW context. In this context, we use Factiva tool to check the relevance of this new way to work before and after the COVID-19 pandemics. This paper discusses some challenges to TM in HW as Relationship based on Trust, Team engagement, Knowledge management, Renewal of Organizational Culture, Inclusive practices and Life-work continuum (LWC). Finally, we present some trends for TM especially in HW to help organizations to counterbalance disruptive events in the future.

1. Introduction

Telework has existed since the 1970s when the technology industry emerged in California, United States. In 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, teleworking began to be used as the main strategy to keep many organizations running around the world [1,2]. World Health Organization and International Labour Organization [3] define telework as the use for work of desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, that is, ICTs, where work is performed outside the employer’s premises. In this paper, telework is defined as a modality of work which is carried out outside the office by using ICT for virtual interaction between the leader and team members.

According to [4], hybrid or blended form of teleworking emerged in post-pandemic is the best approach for maximizing benefits for workforce and minimizing its drawbacks. When work at the office is combined with telework as a standard working model, this approach is called Hybrid Work (HW), a modality that became more common after several COVID-19 waves and lockdowns [5,6]. For Grzegorczyk et al. [7], in the post pandemic context, leaders and teams should plan new ways of working, combining the flexibility of telework with the benefits to face-to-face work in organization.

In this new context, telework is not expected to be done full-time and is becoming ‘hybrid work’ as a flexible work approach where employees work partly at their physical workplace and partly remotely from home or from another workspace. In addition to the physical location, telework is diluting the time limits of work and leisure, impacting temporary stability and raising doubts about long-term performance and satisfaction. The transition brought to the forefront a growing need to pay special attention to pandemic effects on workers’ wellbeing [8]. Placing employees at the center of organizations has turned into an imperative because organizations across sectors and countries need to continuously improve performance and productivity to attain long term sustainability.

New work structures expand to include flexible working hours developed, combining office work with teleworking options. New work methods additionally affect work relationships and reconfigure boundaries of the Life-work continuum (LWC) [9]. Workers had to learn digital skills and new forms of interaction at work (for example, in virtual meetings), with leaders and other team members requiring new approaches to manage talent, positioning TM as an organizational priority. The new normal transformed the mechanisms of supervision and coordination [8].

HW required deep changes in organizations, including, inward and outward looking structure and strategies, practices and processes to replace the traditional workplace in an office work environment [10,11]. In the emerging hybrid environment leaders need to adjust notions of time and space to be more agile to respond the disruptive events and need to establish work relations based on trust and diversity [12,13]. Workers worldwide are experiencing changes in values, ethics, and work habits [14] to adapt to this new context [15].

This article discusses challenges for sensible leaders managing Talent Management (TM) in Hybrid Work (HW) as a pathway for helping organizations to attract, maintain, develop, and retain talent by developing strategies for managing disruptive events and crises. Although the core of the talent management concept is the same even in this kind of environments, increasingly common, the circumstances appeal leaders to take into account the speed of changes, the advances of technology, and the needs of people in modern work and family life.

The new work environment requires continuous updating of knowledge and skills that people need to conduct job responsibilities. TM is a paradigm shift centered on people offering effective alternatives for managing organizations across sectors by optimizing talent development and the talent pool necessary for supporting HW based work structures. Demands are changing considerably because the workplace and working hours are subject to constant disruptions in the global VUCA (volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous) environment [16,17]. This article helps leaders to think about TM strategies. In HW environments TM can help organizations to be more competitive and innovative in search of long-term sustainability. For this, we present the main topics concerning this article and some reflections corroborated by the growing interest that it has caused in media as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we show with an application of the Factiva^® tool.

2. Reflecting on Hybrid Working

Hybrid Working allows remote working and provides working with a flexible schedule [14]. Hybrid Working means that part of the work activities is carried out outside the office and it is performed adopting new information and communication technologies through remote work, which has some advantages and disadvantages (

Table 1. Advantages and disadvantages of Hybrid Working.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Employee	Many employees like, greater autonomy.	Misunderstandings in online interactions.
	Better work-life balance.	Social isolation and lack of socialization, especially among younger people (Generation Z)
	Better care for children or dependants.	Lack of job visibility.
	Reduction of travel time and cost.	Lack of technical support.
	Higher productivity.	Stress, psychological exhaustion.
Company	Strengthening the organizational culture.	Intrusion into employees’ personal lives.
	Minimal infrastructures.	Benefits of personal interaction between colleagues or synergies are lost.
	Cost reduction.	Difficulty to build trust
	Organizational flexibility.	Investment in security systems.
	Decentralization of services.	Difficulty in supervision and control.
Society	Reduction of maintenance costs of public transport and roads.	Lack of control in working conditions.
	Response to globalization.	Increased medical costs.

Source: Own elaboration based on [14,19,20,21,22].

). Professional requirements in the remote work modality must be the same as those required in shared corporate spaces [18].

Hybrid Working has been strongly boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated organizational, business, technological, knowledge and identity changes, which in many cases were already programmed [5,6,14,23]. Remote work is here to stay in many of these organizations. Since the second term of 2020 (lockdown), the home-based working population doubled, highlighting the number of people who worked from home more than half of the days since then [24]. According to Yang et al. [25], a prediction of working from home approximately 20% of the time is required to find a long-term balance.

In this situation, organizations committed to new ways of working developed their agility and resilience [11,26]. However, in other companies, adaptation to the new reality was not possible and the obligation to make changes, together with the lack of clear public guidelines, led to financial problems and even closure [5,16,22]. Lack of investment in technology at the corporate level and lack of digital skills at the individual level, depending on level of education and age group [24], suddenly surfaced in the COVID-19 disruption.

In this VUCA environment, work values, i.e., the preferences that employees would like to have or consider important in work decisions, have taken on another dimension [21]; we can take as an example the phenomenon of the great resignation [27,28,29]. Human centered management appears to be relevant in this context to help employees use digital resources [22], enhance their soft skills [30] and manage their talent by building a long-term strategy that takes into account social change, people’s needs and environmental aspects [8,31].

In this line, Meluso et al. [32] propose a continuous redesign of virtual collaboration in organizations, to face any kind on disruption. Leaders have to enhance communication through continuous feedback and frequent check-ins with supervisors, breaking down existing communication barriers. This will build a strong collaborative culture, where talent will find free avenues of expression [26].

3. How Can Talent Management (TM) Counterbalance Disruptions in a VUCA World?

The disruptions of the 21st century have had an impact on the management of organizations and put talent at the center of a transformation process. Talent management has become a critical factor in the success of any organization [33] and a topic substantially debated in the 21st century [34].

There is competition for talent and talent management takes place on a global scale for the fact that the movement of change is global, with local impact, which has become a challenge for leaders to develop strategies to act in a VUCA environment. Nowadays, with high global interconnectedness and the fast pace of change, it’s more difficult for humans to keep pace with the technological, demographical, economic, political, and social transformations [35].

A disruptive movement triggered by Industry 4.0 and the COVID-19 pandemic is underway, which tends to intensify in coming years and might require new organizational forms to analyze and interpret events and organize people and technological systems since in the world VUCA an innovation leads exponentially to new innovations [36]. The 4th industrial revolution is disruptive and affects the talent management that can disrupt current, already outdated, paradigmatic thinking of People Management-PM [37].

In a disruptive process, ‘talent matters’, but how to leverage it in organizations? How to discover people’s talents and make them work for the organization? How can leaders use their talent to combine human talents and their capacity for development adaptability, agility, resilience, and flexibility? There is a relationship between talent and competitiveness that depends on the ability to manage people’s resources and capabilities that impacts performance. Those who mobilize their talents promote innovation and make organizations more creative, helping to manage disruptive events and manage crises in search of strategies for changing business environments. So, “talent is the driving force of a company’s success” [38] p. 95.

Talent management must adapt to the hybrid organization of work. According to Summerfield [30], p. 34, “hybrid working can help recruit and retain talent, upskill leaders, boost collaboration and team working, and rebuild the confidence of the younger generation”. On the one hand, employees who are prepared to perform their work in a digital world are needed to minimize the impact of disruptions. On the other hand, the particular needs of older vs. younger employees [21], people with family responsibilities vs. single people [39], big companies vs. SMEs [40], etc. must be considered. Leaders need to care for, support and follow up on work teams [30].

Talent involves cognitive, social, and emotional skills developed during life, learned by experiences lived in educational, professional, and social contexts. Rendo et al. [36], p. 357, suggest that talent is the “manifestation of essential characteristics of individuals”. There are different ways of the use of talent management in the literature and, even though, there is not a single definition or approach universally accepted, an analysis indicated three perspectives: limited focus to PM practices, development of talent pools, and management of talented people [41].

Talent management is complex because it does not only involve attributing roles to employees, but identifying people who are most prepared for these roles, according to the needs of the organization and talents of employees [36]. Talent Management involves the establishment of strategies to discover, attract, train, develop, retain, promote, and advance all employees in the organization to continuously expand the talent pool [33]. The main purpose of talent management is nurture and maintain a talent pool of competent and engaged employees [42].

It involves the capacity to mobilize and combine Hard and Soft Skills, in a democratic way, with agility and flexibility, through the configuration and reconfiguration of work, to adapt and/or manage crises caused by disruptive events. Clauss [37] p. 213, highlights that “the ‘new’ and ‘reinvented’ talent management approach focuses on agility, customized solutions, letting go of control, and finding the sustainability sweet spot”.

Talent Management practices depend on the leaders’ capabilities to persuade employees in order to invest their time and resources in new and risky initiative, manage teamwork, stimulate creative employee engagement, autonomy, collaboration and independence [38,43]. It also depends on organizational culture [42]. Bhatia [43] developed a review of literature involving four dimensions of TM: Talent Attraction, Talent Maintenance, Talent Development and Talent Retention. The results revealed some initiatives required by companies globally during and post COVID-19 (

Table 2. Talent Management initiatives required to be globally adopted by companies during and post COVID-19.

Talent Attraction	Talent Maintenance	Talent Development	Talent Retention
Create an internal Talent Marketplace Artificial Intelligence for advance planning	Work from Home options Benefit plans Priority to Employees’ Income Avoid radical changes Social enterprise: purpose, potential, perspective.	Specific Training Programs and necessary Information Training for hobbies and Creative Art Leadership development Digital training	FAQ Guides Therapy Sessions Continuous communication Stability and Growth Opportunities Analytical Tools to understand Employee Wellbeing Culture of Trust and Cooperation

Source: Adapted by [43].

).

These initiatives can provide insights to develop workforce strategies to TM in organizations and indicate that disruptions and crises are challenges to organizations. Bhatia [43] p. 154, suggests five critical strategies: Reflect, Recommit, Re-engage, Rethink and Reboot, that “will help in providing better response to the new normal and a strong foundation to thrive post crisis”. These initiatives about Talent Management are common in the literature with the objective of achieving a high performance of employees and organizations, but according to [34] there are some perspectives of TM that are still unexplored as career planning, succession management, organizational commitment.

Managing Talent Management is challenging because it involves inward–outward looking. Clauss [37] presented TM challenges at a micro and macro level, summarized in

Table 3. Talent Management Challenges.

Micro-level TM Challenges

Pression to move to a share economy. Untethering of work from a physical location. Displacement of human labor by technology. Demand growth for diversity, inclusion and belonging. Juxtaposing of direct full-time employment model to contingent work and an increasingly wide range of alternative work arrangement. Changing are making workers feel “overwhelmed”. Shifts from gainful employment status in a company to multiple independent and less secure worker modalities. Changing careers due to (in)voluntary disruptions or setbacks. New generations looking for flexibility, leaving stifling jobs where they felt trapped, overworked, demotivated and unappreciated.

Macro-level TM Challenges

Tensions and threats in government and governance systems caused by the global risk contexts. Demographic pressures of the 100-year life. Lingering impact of the global economic downturn. Mass migration of labor. Insufficiency of social security systems. Call for universal guaranteed income.

Source: Own elaboration based on [37].

.

Challenges indicated in Table 3 characterize the complexity to manage talents in organizations for the reason that there are outward factors that is difficult to manage and inward factors that indicate a new way to capture, maintain, develop and retain people with singularity and sensibility. It suggests a new lens for TM, regarding that the careers in a VUCA world are adaptive. To illustrate how a disruption, as a COVID-19 Pandemic, impact in Talent Management, we propose a debate using the press in a specific context (Spain).

4. Materials and Methods

Talent Management is one of the management areas that has attracted most attention of specialists and organizations and, therefore, has grown fastest in the last decade. The intertemporal comparison based on the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS-CC) reports that the total number of documents published on talent management during the last decade increased 3.5 times compared to the immediately previous decade. Academic interest peaked in 2020, when the Normalized Impact per Year (NIY) [44] was the highest since the first recorded publication in WoS-CC, 20 years ago.

To support our work, we show the results of information published before and after COVID-19 lockdown, the worst disruption lived in recent years. For this, we use the tool from Dow Jones™, Factiva^®, a business database of press, corporate and trade information that includes about 35,000 sources of news. Today, more than a hundred papers in WoS-CC include the topic “Factiva”, and they show applied analysis, for example, about think tanks in Europe; see [44,45].

COVID-19 pandemic has introduced several challenges for managing employees in organizations, mainly after introduction of new and more flexible working arrangements. Telework and hybrid forms of work emerged as modalities that can affect the relationship between leaders, employees, organizations and society. By analyzing this phenomenon with the tool Factiva^®, we realize about the relevance of topics we deal with in this article.

A first approach to refracted reality [46] makes it possible to visualize the driving forces on a subject and what is its projection when it comes to public opinion. In this way, the media agenda and the development vector of a theme are evaluated in an intertemporal analysis.

To do this, a database owned by Dow Jones™, Factiva^®, was used, including news and other content published by more than 35,000 media outlets and news agencies from more than 190 countries.

Searches have been made for the co-occurrence of the terms crisis, disruption, volatility, uncertainty, complexity or ambiguity, together with terms such as talent management, remote talent, telework or Hybrid Working.

Highlighting that COVID-19 represented an unexpected disruption for the main developed economies, the WHO Pandemic declaration (11 March 2020) has been taken as a point of reference, analyzing two different sub-periods that include two years before and after that date. Period 1 analyzes all the news items that match the search criteria, and that were published in Spain and in Spanish between 11 March 2018 and 10 March 2020. Period 2 analyzes all the matching news items that were published between on 11 March 2020 and 10 March 2022.

The overview allows knowing not only the characterization of the discourse that aspects such as talent management, remote work, hybrid or telework, in the presence of a VUCA context (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) shaped in the public imagination.

The analysis carried out allows us to observe, in a comparative way, periods in which how these issues became transversal, along dimensions provided by Factiva, such as subjects, institutions, or activity sectors.

5. Results

The results show a significant evolution regarding the number of news items published in Spain on talent management and Hybrid Working systems. The pandemic fueled the debate on these issues and multiplied the interest of the media and society. The main themes with which the search criteria used are associated (

Table 4. Ranking of the Top 10 subjects before (P1) and after (P2) the declaration of the COVID-19 Pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) *.

Period 1 (03/2018 to 03/2020)			Period 2 (03/2020 to 03/2022)
Subjects	Publications	Percent	Subjects	Publications	Percent
Novel Coronaviruses	85	23.29%	Outbreaks/Epidemics	2937	19.77%
Health	68	18.63%	Novel Coronaviruses	2798	18.84%
Outbreaks/Epidemics	46	12.60%	Labor/Personnel	2158	14.53%
Labor/Personnel	37	10.14%	Telecommuting	1317	8.87%
Telecommuting	18	4.93%	General Labor Issues	1041	7.01%
Health/Social Services Department	14	3.84%	Health	657	4.42%
General Labor Issues	12	3.29%	Regulation/Government Policy	355	2.39%
Executive Branch	10	2.74%	Regional Politics	246	1.66%
Regulation/Government Policy	8	2.19%	Domestic Politics	239	1.61%
Domestic Politics	6	1.64%	Education	205	1.38%
Top10 Subjects Concentration	304	83.29%	Top10 Subjects Concentration	11.413	80.47%

* Data provided by Factiva^®.

).

After the COVID-19 Pandemic was declared, articles and news related to the epidemic, labor, and personnel, telecommuting and general labor issues rose positions in the Top 10 topics. For their part, they appear in the ranking of main topics Education and regional politics. The concentration of themes decreases considerably, from a concentration of the Top 10 main themes of 83.29% (P1) to a concentration of 80.47% (P2).

Regarding the institutions driving public debate (

Table 5. Ranking of the Top 10 institutions before (P1) and after (P2) the declaration of the COVID-19 Pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) *.

Period 1 (03/2018 to 03/2020)			Period 2 (03/2020 to 03/2022)
Institutions	Publications	Percent	Institutions	Publications	Percent
Spain Ministry of Health	24	40.68%	Central Sindical Independiente y de funcionarios	98	7.90%
European Union	5	8.47%	Confederación Española de Organizaciones Empresariales	82	6.61%
The Junta of Andalucia	4	6.78%	Telefonica SA	82	6.61%
Telefonica SA	3	5.08%	Spain Ministry for Territorial Policy and Public Function	60	4.84%
Spain Ministry of Labor and Social Economy	3	5.08%	European Union	42	3.39%
Madrid Community Ministry of Health	3	5.08%	Banco de España	38	3.06%
Banco de Sabadell SA	2	3.39%	Iberdrola SA	38	3.06%
International Labor Organization	2	3.39%	Unión General de Trabajadores de España	34	2.74%
INSEAD	2	3.39%	Generalitat of Catalonia	32	2.58%
Vodafone Espana SA	1	1.69%	World Health Organization	29	2.34%
Top10 Institutions Concentration	49	83.05%	Top10 Institutions Concentration	535	43.15%

* Data provided by Factiva^®.

), the evolution of the different media agendas promoted after the declaration of a pandemic to institutions linked to social dialogue between workers’ unions and business groups (Central Sindical Independiente y of Officials, General Union of Workers of Spain, and Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations).

They also hold positions and are in the Top 10 of institutions such as the Spain Ministry for Political Territorial and Public Function, the Generalitat of Catalonia and the World Health Organization. The concern about Hybrid Working and Talent Management in crises contexts such as the one experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic became transversal, as it can be seen when analyzing the concentration of news around the Top 10 institutions, which went from 83.05% (P1) to 43.15% (P2). One interesting point in the Table 5 is the presence of unions and organization’s confederations only in the second period, which reveals how the Pandemic context mobilized discussions about subjects as talent management and modalities or work.

From the perspective of the industries (

Table 6. Ranking of the Top 10 Activity Sectors before (P1) and after (P2) the declaration of the COVID-19 Pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) *.

Period 1 (03/2018 to 03/2020)			Period 2 (03/2020 to 03/2022)
Activity Sectors	Publications	Percent	Industries	Publications	Percent
Real Estate	5	13.51%	Telecommunication Services	90	5.97%
Telecommunication Services	4	10.81%	Lodgings/Restaurants/Bars	87	5.77%
Banking	4	10.81%	Real Estate	85	5.64%
Financial Services	4	10.81%	E-commerce	64	4.24%
Building Construction	3	8.11%	Technology	59	3.91%
Residential Building Construction	3	8.11%	Retail	51	3.38%
Construction	3	8.11%	Transportation/Logistics	40	2.65%
Wireless Telecommunications Services	2	5.41%	Banking	38	2.52%
Mobile Telecommunications	2	5.41%	Shopping Malls/Superstores	34	2.25%
Commercial Banking	2	5.41%	Financial Services	34	2.25%
Top10 Industries Concentration	32	86.49%	Top10 Industries Concentration	582	38.59%

* Data provided by Factiva^®.

), the comparative analysis of news between the periods before and after the health crisis also shows a profile of greater interest in sectors such as logistics, e-commerce, retail and shopping malls.

The evidence found suggests that during the evolution of the first two years of the pandemic, there was a strong transversality between industries in the interest in aspects related to talent management based on the use of technologies that would promote Hybrid working and remote, synchronous, and asynchronous work, going from 86.49% (P1) to 38.59% (P2). There is an increase in interest by the media after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of news items increased in absolute terms while the thematic concentration decreased in relative terms, endorsing an increase in thematic transversality.

In addition, the results show strong reduction in the concentration of the Top 10 industries and institutions, confirming the transversality between sectors and public and private organizations that represented their communication agenda in the media, both from the perspective of international institutions and companies and national, regional, or local institutions. An analyzes involving some news about talent management indicates an adaptation to the new normality [47], just after the summer, once the period of intense confinement suffered in Spain after the Declaration of the State of Alarm [48] has been overcome. Subsequently, the debate that arises from the paradigm shift is articulated. As a consequence, the press media analyze the productivity of teleworking [49], the possibilities offered by teleworking for greater self-fulfilment at work [50], reaching a specific sectoral analysis around the IT industries in Spain and how a potential setback in the flexibility granted during the pandemic could become a disincentive for talent retention [51].

In fact, most workers were willing to adopt a hybrid workday once the new normal was established after the mass vaccination process carried out during the summer of 2021. Although teleworking decreased compared to the mandatory confinement period of the State of Alarm of March 2020, once the extremely serious health situation had been overcome, it still tripled the rates prior to the pandemic. As a consequence, companies must adjust their labor structure and the skills training of their employees, in order to take advantage of the challenge that arises in the new context of post-COVID business competitiveness [52].

We believe that the press interest in this subject indicates that disruptive events provoke reflections and actions to convey information to workers, organizations and society that can help all agents to think policies and practices to counterbalance this disruption and introduce strategies to manage this VUCA environment.

The evidence found reports that the debate intensified and accelerated with the pandemic and in a few months the paradigm shift was broadcast in the media, reaching public opinion in a few months. With the new normality, the changes caused by the disruption caused by COVID-19 remained in the talent management mechanisms and, as a consequence, contributed to profoundly transform labor relations in Spain. There is an increase in interest by the media after the declaration of a COVID-19 pandemic. The number of news items increased in absolute terms while the thematic concentration decreased in relative terms, endorsing an increase in thematic transversality. Managing the human talent in the Hybrid Working is challenging for TM and leaders have a central role in this process.

6. Discussion: Sensible Leaders Challenges for Managing Talent Management in Hybrid Work

We have experienced one of the major disruptions in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the confinement coming from it, which has occurred in many countries and has made us examine our professional context in order to understand the VUCA environment where constant disruptions and crises occur. This situation requires professionals to possess and refine their ability to adapt to new working conditions. These disruptions are continuous, even though small in magnitude, caused by legislative or technological changes, provoking transformations in the relationship between competitors or in customers. Therefore, we should not wait for a major disruption before reacting; we must manage talent well from the present in order not only to survive, but also to succeed.

For HW to work, two dimensions must be considered. On the one hand, organizations must be technically prepared with technological artifacts and support, such as computers, video conferencing equipment, storage devices, etc. On the other hand, people are the key to develop processes, being necessary to develop TM focused on programs centered in digital and soft skills, wellbeing and a multidimensional perspective of career, considering each dimension of life (e.g., work, family) as a career.

Leaders are central actors in this process, they need to be more flexible, and introduce a more sensible leadership style. This sensibility is the core of the HCM book Sensible Leadership [53]. This is a sense of leadership putting people in the heart of a management context, where leaders must be sensible to warrant wellbeing through their capacity to perceive the reality around the context of action. It demands to see the leader as a ‘radar’, that capture what is happening in the environment. In this sense, HW represents an important paradigm shift for leaders and organizational culture. This new approach is presented in two ways, as a challenge and as an opportunity. The challenge of managing people remotely-synchronously and asynchronously, together with people in a face-to-face context, and the opportunity to stimulate the creative potential of talent, freeing it of the yoke that supposes certain secular inertias of the organizational design.

During the design of a new HW, leaders need to be sensible, creative and humble with the objective to create organization cohesion and engagement [13], through TM strategies for retention and focus on wellbeing practices for the employees. With that said, the challenges to TM in the HW context are:

6.1. Relationship Based on Trust

In HW, managing relationship is challenging because leaders generally create virtual teams with employees who work in site and in other spaces to develop projects and make decision to solve problems. For [54], trust is a critical factor in virtual teams in search of team cohesiveness, knowledge sharing, and engagement.

Sensible leaders [53] must create relationships based on trust with your team. Some behaviors of these leaders are the following: communication with transparency and truth, showing consideration and respect for all employees, making the organization’s expectations clear as well as what can be offered to the team, in order to create a culture of trust throughout the organization. These behaviors should be guided by common sense and by moderating their actions when necessary.

6.2. Team Engagement

Team engagement is closely related to the ability to mobilize energy and commitment with the team results. This requires leaders to keep the team well-informed, which becomes a challenge when several work modalities integrate the organization’s HW model. In addition, employees must feel how the degrees of freedom they have are comparable in telework environments.

Pandita and Ray [42] proposed a 4E model to retain talent that can help leaders to plan and implement talent management practices emphasizing retain talent. They understand talent management and retain as a cyclical process. The 4Es of the model are: Employee value proposition to attract talent, Enhance employee capabilities and experience, Employee engagement, and enduring relationship.

In this model, Engagement is critical for retain talent. It improves the commitment with objectives and goals, prompts team performance, impact in innovation and enthusiasm at the workplace for ensure quality results. As a result of talent management practices, engagement can help leaders to attract, develop, and maintain a healthy talent pool.

Leaders must assume a participating leadership style [53], with space for everyone to express their opinions on global or local issues and promote actions as a result of this dialogue process, which has a high potential for team engagement. It reveals that talent management practices are essential for team engagement in HW.

6.3. Knowledge Management

Another challenge regards how to manage knowledge in organizations that adopt a HW model. The use of technological platforms to capture and disseminate knowledge is fundamental, especially explicit knowledge, but how to foster tacit knowledge in teams that work in different learning environments, such as those who are on-site and those who work remotely? For Jothi and Savarimuthu [55] p. 8916, upskilling is essential because knowledge is an asset and organizations need to focus “both on developing their underpinning knowledge management infrastructure and on promoting a culture that encourages the effective creation, refinement, sharing and storage of knowledge”.

Leaders have a decisive role in this process and can plan online training sessions, as well as value lifelong learning more generally. TM policies in telework environments allows restructure organizations to optimize intra-organizational knowledge flows and design integrative talent systems that allow adding people in diversity [55,56], taking advantage of the possibilities of teleworking to optimize knowledge flows and available talent, both inside and outside the organization.

6.4. Renewal of Organizational Culture

HW demands the ability of leaders to spread a TM strategy that strengthens the bonds between employees who work in various workspaces. This requires the dissemination of personal values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors based on trust, diversity, and the institutionalization of inclusive practices that allow people to feel part of the organization, even when they are working in different social spaces, or even in countries with different cultures. Intrinsic motivation and an active communication policy are required to reinforce commitment and prevent people from feeling isolated and excluded.

Renewal of organizational culture is necessary to develop Talent Management practices [42], where talent and engagement can emerge [57], adapted to HW contexts with strategies to attract, maintain, develop and retain employees that add value to organization and for society.

6.5. Inclusive Practices

HW must be inclusive and have diversity and equity as principles. The MacKinsey survey results reported by [13] reveal that inclusive organizational cultures that promote trust and a sense of support increase retention, collaboration, and job satisfaction. For TM, HW models can make the organization a more attractive place to work, which demands flexible leaders, who must institutionalize inclusive practices centered on three principles: work-life support (nonwork demands, responsibilities and interests), team building (foster trust, collaboration and health conflict) and mutual respect (genuine concern for the wellbeing and commitment to treat one another fairly and respectfully). Mutual respect can be enhanced in organizational cultures by creating norms that encourage employees to view one another as human beings; to foster a culture that encourages employees to learn with and from one another; and to celebrate and amplify employee contributions.

Hughes [58] propose that leaders can obtain success in organization developing a Diversity Intelligence, that is a capability to “recognize the value of workplace diversity and to use this information to guide thinking and behavior […] integrating intellectual, emotional intelligences to be more effective”.

6.6. Life-Work Continuum

The life-work continuum advances the integration of all life areas including work. HW reveals the tight coupling, home-work spaces intermingle, and the fusion distorts the continuum prior to the new normal. Work-family support is highlighted by [13] as one of the factors presented as a priority for McKinsey research participants indicating that organizations need to establish policies that support flexibility, including extended parental leave, sick leave, flexible hours, and work-from-home policies. LWC introduces an integrative perspective of life and work as a holistic continuum to support people’s individual wellbeing. From an organization point of view, a challenge is to renew the culture as well as contributing to TM and to a better life in the workplace [9].

In this sense, the gender perspective is a transversal line that must be considered. The TM must consider the existing risks regarding the gender gap between men and women [59]. TM must contribute to prevent the HW from causing the dissolution of the existing borders between time and the workplace, and between time and family care and increasing inequalities [60]. Given the pre-existing gender gap, this risk is greater for women, and consequently the renegotiation of family roles initiated in the context of COVID-19 should be taken into consideration so that it does not represent a setback to comparative analysis, both in terms of health imbalances, and decreased productivity [61]. Despite the better social consideration that the new forms of HW have experienced [62], the overlapping of work and family, in the same social space, interspersing work and domestic tasks poses a risk, along with the care and education of children, which must be addressed by the TM on HW design.

The pursuit of wellbeing is the responsibility of everyone involved, but leaders must have the sensitivity to support policies that define principles and practices that, for their part, prioritize a wellbeing organizational culture and perceive the employee as a multidimensional human being, regarding biological, psychic, social and affective dimensions.

7. Conclusions

This article contributes for organizations that go through this critical moment and introduces processes and practices for TM to counterbalance the changes caused by disruptions and crises that affect organizations around the world and that will be increasingly constant in people’s lives.

The TM challenges noted in this article are not the only important ones, but they were identified because they characterize the current context and demand sensitivity from leaders to understand how each will impact the organization’s performance in turbulent, uncertain, and disruptive environments. A McKinsey and Company report [63] revealed that many organizations are going through a critical juncture in terms of talent development and skill building, revealing that drastic changes are needed to thrive or survive in the future.

TM and HW do not only mean developing models for managing the workforce, promoting the development of technical, digital and social skills; they also mean perceiving people as unique human beings who must be valued and respected by leaders who need to have the sensitivity to manage different modalities and work teams with respect and through valuing their diversity. In fact, the two inverse typologies are relevant: employees who do not want hybrid work because they want complete teleworking to have greater flexibility, autonomy and time availability based on fewer trips, and employees who do not want hybrid work because they want conventional face-to-face work.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a process of debate in public opinion that had not been developed in the previous two years, accelerating important changes in talent management and teleworking. Future research should broaden the temporal scope of this study and evaluate the persistence of these changes over time, once the most serious stage of the pandemic has passed.

There are some trends for TM in the future, mainly in HW. One is related to the use of the latest technological developments (e.g., AI, machine learning ML, blockchain or peer-to-peer P2P). Another is the creation and promotion of fair collaborative work communities, which is an important line of development of the future theory and practice on TM in contemporary hybrid contexts, equitable and respectful of all. This paradigm shift set forth an important line of reflection that should contribute to articulating the debates on the future of TM in the workplace.

This article has some limitations. The database evaluated for the analysis of the news corpus has focused on the media and news agencies offered by Factiva^® and during a very specific period. Future research should broaden the scope of this study, extending its time horizon and the number of media analyzed, including the discourse generated by society in social networks through methodologies such as web scraping and machine learning to take an adequate perspective regarding the new contemporary disruptions. New scopes of analysis should include the transformation of the best practices on TM in HW and its debate in public opinion, according to the disruptions on HW according to the contraction of value chains and the regionalization of value chains or the energy crisis aggravated and accelerated after the start of the war in Ukraine. Furthermore, future analyzes should evaluate the way in which sustainability acted as a driver of the socio-technical transition for teleworking and talent management during the health crisis and once the new normal has been achieved.