Agility and new forms of work: applications, challenges and potentials

Companies are confronted with various disruptions and a dynamic environment. On the one hand, markets are characterized by uncertainty and dynamics that reflect a need for companies and employees to adapt. On the other hand, the COVID-19-pandemic in particular has significantly increased the importance of working outside the office. Broad segments of the population have had to work on short notice, mostly from home. This circumstance is likely to accompany companies and employees in the future as infrastructure has been established and benefits have become apparent. This cumulative dissertation contributes to the understanding of possible cause-effect relationships and appropriate responses of companies. The thesis focuses on possible out-of-office work that is partial and characterized by adaptability or flexibility. Agile work, as a construct to describe successful work in dynamic and complex environments, is thereby applied in remote work or HW to determine possible success factors and challenges. In addition, corporate support measures are inserted and examined in this research context. With the help of qualitative and quantitative research, the interrelationship between remote work, agile work, and enablers is examined. The first article clarifies the relationship between change management and agility and highlights its role as an enabler in increasing agility or integrating into it. The insight that the increase of agility itself is a profound change and therefore has to be accompanied by change management is central. The second article adapts and transfers the underlying construct of this dissertation, ‘Agile Work’, into the specific context of remote work. Characteristics such as autonomy, flexibility, willingness to learn, adaptability and proactivity are also central indicators for successful work in remote work. However, this positive effect is not insignificantly determined by HRM, since agile employees use special enablers. Companies must provide their employees with work organization guidelines, ‘policies’, to organize on-site and remote work collaboration. The third article qualitatively and quantitatively explores possible policies, examines their prevalence, analyzes them in terms of their flexibility and autonomy, and derives a framework, which can help define this key enabler. The fourth article explores possible specific challenges in the context of HW. It turns out that there is a plethora of challenges. A survey provides information on the expression of these items and an analysis examines the influence of the support perceived by employees: It is shown that the expression of the challenges varies significantly with the support and is therefore a key factor for companies.