After the increase in teleworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have seen the potential of this way of working and wish to initiate or advance its implementation in a planned way. To this end, it may be useful to develop the capacity of their managers or professionals to be smart working agents, in order to promote the implementation of a form of flexible teleworking that makes good use of technological tools and that favours the best working conditions. After defining smart working, this article presents a competency framework for the role of a smart working agent focused on three key competencies: understanding the context, facilitating implementation, and leading in a digital environment.

The article first describes the different meanings given to the expression “new ways of working” in recent decades. It highlights its link to flexibility in the relationship between the employer and the workforce, with increasing emphasis on the separation from full-time, permanent employment conducted on company premises. This is followed by an introduction to the contributions included in this monograph, which offer a broad overview of the current new ways of working, paying particular attention to telework and presenting a critical view of the impact of platform work and telework.

Evidence-based people management is an approach to the profession and practice of people management that focuses on increasing the use of critical thinking and the best evidence available for decision-making. This article puts forward several reasons why people management practitioners do not adopt a more evidence-based approach and argues how useful this approach can be for organizations. A seven-stage process is presented for making decisions that make better use of evidence: identifying, asking, acquiring, appraising, aggregating, applying and assessing. There are four sources of evidence that can improve the quality of decisions in people management: scientific evidence, organizational data, professional experience and stakeholder input. Finally, practical suggestions are offered for implementing this approach in organizations, as well as the main objections presented by managers are outlined.

The psychological wellbeing of workers derives from a proper balance between, on the one hand, motivating challenges and obstacles faced and, on the other hand, job and personal resources to overcome them. Managers or supervisors are in a privileged position to make this balance possible, through their daily behavior shown in their leadership style. Leadership styles can be ordered according to their impact on job stress, from the most negative to the most positive style: abusive, passive, transactional and transformational. The article explains the ways in which managers can affect employees' psychosocial wellbeing and the specific role of each leadership style. Finally, it concludes by giving responsibility to develop more positive leadership styles not only to individual managers, but also to companies and institutions, as well as educational institutions.