The nature of work has already, for some time, been undergoing major changes as a result of technological progress. Mobile, virtual and cloud technologies, and the infrastructures that support them, are increasingly enabling work to be done from anywhere and at any time. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this process, driving a large share of white-collar knowledge work to remote and hybrid modes. In this chapter, we explore how the increasing disconnection of work from time and place influences HRM, highlighting important new questions and concerns that HR needs to consider in the key areas of performance management, recruitment and talent management, training and development and diversity management. We also suggest elements requiring increased HR focus going forward, including building employee engagement and an inspiring organizational culture in a virtual and hybrid environment; focusing on the sustainability of working life and employee wellbeing; and facilitating a resilient employee mindset.@en

Industrial revolutions have always been associated with major shifts in how people work, moving from agricultural and craft-based occupations to factory work in the first one, to assembly line work and scientific management in the second, and to knowledge work in the third industrial revolution (Bower and Christensen, 1995; Bodrožić and Adler, 2017). Currently, societies and organizations everywhere are experiencing a fourth industrial revolution, the key characteristic of which is an increasing blurring of the boundaries between the physical and the digital worlds (Schwab, 2017; Barley et al., 2017). A number of technologies have been associated with this widespread merger of the physical and the digital, ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing, resulting in major changes in business models and production methods across industries. In addition to these industry …@en