Hard Facts or Half-Truths? The Social and Economic Sustainability Impact of Flexible Work Practices in Organizations

The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments worldwide to impose recommended movement restrictions on their citizens. Significant Human Resource Management challenges have occurred, including but not limited to, hiring freezes, layoffs and how work is done from the central offices of small and big organizations. The incidence of flexible work increased sharply during the restrictions. Many employees and employers have expressed a desire for an increased degree of working from home, even after the pandemic. However, there are concerns about how employee productivity and wellbeing will negatively be impacted by the unfamiliar flexible work practice and context abound. Updated, quality-assured and generalizable knowledge about how flexible work affects employee experience of job fit, work performance and firm-level metrics is needed. This contributes to the assessment of sustainability impact of implementing new working arrangements in a way that reduces risk and promotes positive impacts.

Flexible working practices have been linked to several metrics of importance to employee and organization’s outcomes namely, worker performance and productivity, absenteeism, turnover, commitment, and overall firm performance. Previous reviews suggest the relationship might be positive and yet there are discrepancies in findings even in abundance of research.

The aim of this article collection is therefore to compile published research on the sustainability impact of flexible working arrangements including but not limited to working from home, from a socio-economic perspective in terms of employee and organizational outcomes. The focus of this collection seeks to contribute to three pertinent research questions.
1) What is the connection between flexible working practices and employees’ work performance (i.e. work content execution, effectiveness)?
2) What is the connection between working from home and firm-level metrics including added value, innovation, turnover intentions, cost-saving impacts and general productivity?
3) What type of flexible work arrangement is more socially and economically sustainable and for whom (i.e. categories of occupations and individual workers)? One area of keen interest can be studies of gender-based perspectives on the impacts of these practices.

Keywords: Flexible Working Arrangements, Sustainable Management, Person-Organization Fit, Job Fit, Organization Metrics, Economic Value, Social Value

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.