The health emergency caused by COVID-19 has reopened, with particular vigour, the debate surrounding the impact of teleworking on working conditions, as well as on the possibilities it offers for conciliation. Given the high level of telework among women, it is necessary to reflect on the impact that the use of this mode of productive work may have on them and on other aspects of daily life. The extent of teleworking implies a threat to women in the sense that teleworking can have a particularly negative impact on women’s work, and this, in turn, would put at risk the progress made during the last few years in the area of gender equality. The regulation of telework is necessary to prevent it from turning into a trap that places the burden of conciliation on women.

Over the last decade, the business world has experienced abrupt changes due to the irruption of the platform economy. E-commerce giants and application-based business models have become key spaces in the economy, facilitating consumption in terms of convenience, immediacy, and availability. However, these new ways of organizing services, while easing the consumer experience, have controversial effects on the organization of work. This article provides a critical reflection on the newly emerging jobs in the platform economy sector. It will highlight the importance of the imaginary of consumption as a key enabler of these changes in employment.

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.

On the occasion of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the creation of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), the authors take the opportunity to reflect on the recent evolution of the labour market in Spain and its labour relations, as well as its future challenges. A period that begins with a long phase of expansion of the Spanish economy and ends with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the middle, events with a relevant economic and labour effect such as (i) the relocation that has accompanied globalization, (ii) the migratory movements that have rendered us a host country, (iii) the violent impact that the Great Recession that began in 2008 and the pandemic of 2020, as well as (iv) the process of technological and digital transformation in which we are immersed. Despite this, the article does not have a vocation for the past and stops in the analysis on two great challenges. Job quality, a challenge that has been present in the last twenty-five years and that, far from being resolved, has become more urgent. And the digitization of employment, the great test of the Spanish economy and society that may be a turning point in our employment structure.

The regulation of work has been built on a dependent/self-employed dichotomy, which is being overcome by the development of new forms of employment. Among these, those linked to new economic models, such as the collaborative economy, are becoming very relevant. In these forms of work people provide services with an economic value, but outside traditional markets and contractual schemes. These provisions of services find a faulty fit in this binary model, demanding their own regulatory framework. The objective of this work is to define this problem, and to propose some alternatives to solve it.

The evolution towards the network company and the resulting fragmentation of work increases the number of self-employed persons with intermittent relationships between various employers and with their potential co-workers. In this context, «collectives of the self-employed» emerge in contrast to the narrative that self-employed workers are isolated from each other. These collectives organise fights against algorithms, fights for labour rights, pool material and digital resources and even present themselves to the market under a unified brand without being a company. As emerging forms of organisation, they face challenges regarding their recognition as actors in social dialogue and are even accused of acting as cartels under the prism of free competition. Although their current forms are probably not the definitive forms, we can intuit that the «collectives of the self-employed» have and will have a relevant role in defining the ways of working and living in the future.