And yet it moves. HR professionals’ perceptions in driving organizations in the new normal

Due to unpredictable changes such as institutional and societal disruptions, social and environmental imperatives, technological shifts, and the incumbent global megatrends such as flexible workforce, digitalization of business models, artificial intelligence, digitization, and machine learning, continuous organizational changes have become everyday issues for many organizations. These trends, also spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, have produced tremendous environmental and societal novelty and uncertainty affecting all organizations. In the last two years, HR professionals played a central role in the transformation of work since they contributed to improving and implementing hybrid working mode under emergencies and in a very short time. Thus, analyzing the HR point of view, the authors explore the advantages and drawbacks of innovative hybrid and hybrid working, the HR professionals’ opinions and work in reacting to organizational challenges and investigate how some demographic variables may influence their perspectives driving them to act in a new professional role at the individual level and challenging a new way of working at organizational and institutional levels, or, on the contrary, to maintain the status quo. The study involves 159 Italian HR professionals and aims to consider the COVID-19 pandemic as a paradigmatic change-accelerating enabler. The results advance both the theoretical literature and the HR best practices. From the academic perspective, the authors provide evidence of how operational, relational, and transactional perspectives have evolved due to the advancement of hybrid working adoption in new organizations in recent years. From a practitioners’ perspective, authors collect the most common best practices that companies in various fields and of different sizes put in place to support one of the more urgent organizational challenges: sustainable hybrid working. Also, strategies and attention points have been unveiled to address HR professionals overcoming the critical issues of legitimation and assuming a new crucial role as change agents in developing workforce mindset and competencies.