REVISITING HR FOR HYBRID WORKPLACES
Authors: Bajpai Dipti Anil , Kulkarni Abhay 
Published: December 2024

The global pandemic has redefined work from home to work from anywhere. The remote or hybrid work arrangement - switching between working from office and remote working is there to stay. While hybrid work offers flexibility to workers it also adds a layer of complexity to operations. The post pandemic disruptions demand agility and resilience at workplaces. As organizations look into the future, they must be able to engage the "everywhere talent" and "everywhere customer", this means accessing new and diverse talent pools. This can be achieved by creating workplace cultures that empower employees to explore their full potential, a feeling of belongingness regardless of their demography. The challenges around hybrid work include employee's motivation, effectively driving collaboration and open communication across teams, and ensuring employees personal and professional lives remain balanced. At the same time the hybrid workplaces will emphasize on Collaboration, Agility & Resilience and Compassionate Leadership. Both the employer and the employee need to work on curating employee centered experience and therefore Hence HR leaders need to focus on building a strategy to ensure that employees engaged and productive while clearly aligning the organizations as well as their own goals, focusing on an inclusive atmosphere with mental wellness as a key priority.PurposeDigital renaissances have made the world so small that anyone can connect with another at any moment. This has been a major enabler of the quick adoption of work from home to work from anywhere, thereby paving way to future organizations characterized by everywhere talent and everywhere customers. Thus, future looking organizations will focus on accessing new and diverse talent pools. This can be achieved by creating workplace cultures that empower employees to explore their full potential, a feeling of belongingness regardless of their demography. This requires organizations to develop new measures to help remote and hybrid workers reestablish sustainable but flexible boundaries between their work responsibilities and their home responsibilities and personal time. MethodologyThe paper is based on systematic literature review of the advent of hybrid workplaces and the benefits and shortcomings of such workplaces that demand a revisit of HR strategies and policies for benefit of both the employer and employee. For this purpose, different articles, research papers available on open source were reviewed with prime focus on keywords for hybrid, work from home, employee engagement, flexibility, support. Explorative search in the articles is used to cover most of the aspects of hybrid workplaces. Findings During the study it was found that the hybrid workplaces to a large extent led to distance bias and deteriorating employee mental health and burnout. Despite the shortcomings Hybrid workplaces also come with promises of work-life balance and flexibility of work. Based on the literature review The Originality/value of paper: Organizations can leverage best practices of organizations promoting hybrid work to ensure improved employee productivity and consequently achievement of organizational goals.