Performance and well-being in changing work environments: Pursuing a sustainable career in translation in post-pandemic times

Change is a prerogative of any organizational and working settings. As open people-based systems, organizations grow, decline, transform themselves rapidly, continuously, deliberatively and unconsciously (Quinn & Weick, 1999). However, the current experience of change brought about by the outbreak of the global pandemic has posed original challenges, forcing individuals and organizations to cope with unexpected demands and to make sense of this brand-new personal and collective experience (van den Heuvel & Demerouti, 2009; Sonenshein & Dholakia, 2012; van den Heuvel, Demerouti & Bakker, 2013). Evidently, the pandemic has invested and transformed undebatable pivots of human life such as professional identity, economic subsistence, work and family organization, children’s education management, imposing a radical revision of the traditional modalities, practices and skills used to manage them. In this vein, Covid-19 could be fundamentally defined as a people-based crisis : individuals are getting sick, and the repercussions for business and society are enormous, and are getting exponentially stronger day by day. From an organizational point of view, the radical digitalization of work, for some companies a quite new experience, has required workers, with different cultural backgrounds, age, gender, to fast adapt fast to new processes and demands, to new workloads and to a new management of their work often relying on personal responsibility and measured on objectives rather than on outputs . As a matter of fact, this sudden change might have impacted on performance as well as on the person/organization relationship in terms of positive organizational behaviors (commitment, extra-role behaviors, etc.). From an individual point of view, the remote management of work has greatly impacted on personal life, requiring also to conciliate work and family demands, often resulting in feelings of frustration and uneasiness with negative implications both for personal wellbeing and organizational performance (see for instance the bidirectional effect of negative work/life spillover or the increase of technostress and/or workaholism). Therefore, a huge responsibility in the management of the implications following to the current situation is attributed to the HRM function, which is called to face these unexpected transformations, working on the impact of this “new normal” on individuals and groups and keeping high-quality and competitive performance (Caligiuri, De Cieri, Minbaeva, Verbeke and Zimmermann, 2020; Carnevale & Hatak, 2020). Accordingly, recent studies in the field show that within the next few years the impact of this global change will lead organizations to confront themselves with a radical redefinition of the traditional person/organization relationship that in turn will be based on completely different premises in terms of mutual expectations and psychological contract as compared with the recent past. The pandemic has impacted on both objective and subjective aspects of the working experience: it has re-organized working spaces, organizational processes, tasks and skills forcing individuals to fastly rapidly? adapt to change . There are many evident transformations that are radically redefining the current socio-cultural and organizational scenario. The main ones could be summed up as follows . Different work conditions. Among the radical changes in work conditions we could consider home offices, new conditions for task setting and controlling, distant work, separation of employees, necessity to wear protective equipment, division of teams into micro-teams, possible loss of connections and relationships between colleagues, possible loss of work habits and behavior, inequalities between employees on home office and on those who have to work on place (Robelski et al., 2019; Stefaniuk, 2020). Research is needed to understand the impact of social separation and technology-mediated communication on workers’ health, well-being and job satisfaction. Distance management and new competencies of managers (especially line and middle management). Issues like motivation, coaching and mentoring, problem and conflict solving, supporting employee performance, process management and employee development, risk management, controlling of working hours are becoming more and more urgent in order to make organizations more effective (Gordon, 2020; Blatch-Jones et al., 2020). Future research could carefully consider if and to what extent distance or online education and training of managers could lead to efficient performance. New ways of HR practices. As a matter of fact, the global Pandemic has imposed a revision of traditional HR practices that have been transformed into distant (online or telephone) practices. Currently, organizations are increasingly exploring the use of digital tools to identify, recruit, retain and assess employees (Blatch-Jones et al., 2020). Training and education of employees using technologies or managing teams online. Even these fundamental HR practices have been transformed using digital tools, with results that need further investigation (Gordon, 2020). Different approach towards generations. Each generation reacts differently on changes, prefers different working conditions, have different computer literacy and have different level of willingness to work under new conditions (Yildirim & Korkmaz, 2017). Information and data security. Use of technologies for sensitive information sharing brings higher demand on security of information systems and software used by organizations and employees (Stefaniuk, 2020). Lowering of salaries and wages, necessity for requalification, risk of job loss. Lower or no possibility to work in some areas for a certain period due to closures, lack of supply, necessity to restructure work and work tasks or job descriptions, etc.