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.

This paper offers a description of the new forms of work, with special emphasis on the advantages and disadvantages that they involve for both employees and employers. From the perspective of Human Resources, these new models, and their coexistence with more traditional forms of employment, present challenges for the conventional management of functions such as planning, performance evaluation, or managing professional careers. Since the advantages that these new forms of work provide are evident, and their expansion is inevitable, all that remains is to minimize some implicit risks for both the employer and the employees.

The trend toward (new) ways of working in Spain after the Covid-19 pandemic shows a deployment of extensive organizational flexibility for dealing with any environment. The focus is on project-based organization, workers’ overall health, implementing systems to monitor performance and two pending tasks: innovation and digitalization. The article describes a study by the Spanish Association of People Management and Development (AEDIPE) during the last quarter of 2021 and the first of 2022, gathering the opinion of 527 CEOs and Human Resources managers of prominent Spanish companies. The results show eight main ideas that enable companies to develop flexibility and reorganization as a means for their stability. 1) More than 35% of workers will consolidate their partial work from home. 2) Companies are looking for performance monitoring tools that give them support for control and trust. 3) The wellbeing of employees is central in the post-Covid-19 era. 4) Innovation and digitalization continue to be pending issues. 5) There are significant differences between the coping strategies of large and small companies. 6) Workspaces tend to become collaborative and sustainable. 7) Project management displaces departmental management in organizational structures. 8) Recruitment and selection are of increasing concern to human resources professionals.

The purpose of this article is to provide some basic information on telework and to develop, in parallel, some reflections on this economic reality and the role of its legal regulation.

For some years, we have been observing a process of transformation of the nuclear bases on which we have built our labour relations. It is the result of digitalization, which challenges the logic of physical concentration and detaches activity from a single, static location. In other words, telework comes as standard with digitalization. However, it is only when its advancement became so abrupt and far-reaching that we noticed the shift and can already sense a break from the traditional work model.

This article explores the evolutionary progress of telework, beginning with two circumstances that were its main driving factors – digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic –; observing it from a double dimension, namely organizational and regulatory, and summarizing the main changes in the narrative on telework, in order to contribute to the reflection on the work of the future society.

This article presents a summary of the results obtained by the research carried out by the author of the article and his colleagues from IDOCAL at the University of Valencia and the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Seville into two interventions designed to improve collaboration in virtual teams. One of these interventions is based on feedback, while the other is based on training team members in emotional management. These interventions have been examined based on experimental studies with a group that received feedback on or training in emotional management and a control group. The results confirmed that virtual teams that received process and outcome feedback experienced an improvement in their perception of group learning and reduced social loafing. The latter also improved virtual teams’ affective outcomes. On the other hand, training in emotional management improved virtual teams’ resilience and reduced relational conflict. There is also an improvement in group engagement in those teams that received training in emotional management. The article concludes with a series of recommendations for improving virtual team collaboration based on the results of this research.

The exponential growth of e-commerce, driven in part by the pandemic and new consumer habits, has highlighted the need to rethink the current model of urban freight distribution (UFD). The more online shopping is generated, the more home delivery is required with its implications in terms of operating costs, traffic, parking, and pollution. Urban logistics, and in particular the last mile, have become one of the main focuses of attention for public administrations and logistics operators in order to minimize these externalities. However, there is still a long way to go to optimize the new logistics processes to the requirements of the new distribution channel. Administrations need to start taking action with the help of logistics operators and citizens. These actions must be carried out quickly and in a consensual manner with all the parties involved, as only then will it be possible to define a sustainable urban logistics model that has continuity over time.

Despite the high number of passengers using metropolitan public transport systems, the limited growth rates of travel demand have not been enough to reduce the use of private vehicles in the main points of access to the city, which continue to show unsustainable patterns with an excessive presence of private vehicles.

With economic activity halfway through, months of the pandemic caused us to forget day-to-day congestion. But with the gradual recovery of metropolitan activity and mobility and the impact of lifting highway tolls and mobility policies that reduced road capacity within the city, road congestion is back, with the consequent aggravation of air pollution levels.

Airports are a source of economic prosperity, but the main airports in many cities are reaching the limits of their capacity. Faced with the difficulty of expanding them, the development of multi-airport systems may be a mechanism for adapting to the pressure of demand. However, multi-airport systems are difficult to develop, as there is no clear typology and they depend on local particulars. On the other hand, and perhaps more relevantly, airlines have few incentives to operate at secondary airports. In a liberalized market, airlines will always tend to concentrate their activity on main airports. In this article, we present these basic principles of functioning that make multi-airport systems a difficult balance, although an interesting one to try to achieve.

Micromobility is based on the sharing of mechanically simple vehicles such as bicycles and scooters, now electrically powered, through electronic devices that access information in real time (that is, through the use of smartphone apps). The electric scooter is the most recent addition to this group of vehicles for individual mobility, which also includes the bicycle. The definition of micromobility has been discussed over recent months and years and has passed through the recent regulatory changes for the Spanish case. The electric scooter offers the possibility of short journeys, mainly replacing public transport, cycling and walking, in a portable folding vehicle. The spaces in which the regulation places electric scooters are very similar to cycling spaces: cycle network lanes and traffic-calmed streets. The pressure from the increase in the flow of vehicles caused by the addition of e-scooters (which sometimes even doubles it) to cycle lanes, and the risks arising from the cohabitation of motor-powered vehicles (scooters) and non-powered ones (into which category fall the vast majority of bicycles) in the same space, reveal the need to improve the capacity and safety of cycling infrastructures and to provide safe shared roads in which speed reductions are effective. In the immediate future, it will be important to continue to question the differences and similarities between the vehicles making up the concept of micromobility and the use made of them in order to generate policies that offer fair, healthy and safe access to micromobility for everyone.