GLOBAL DYNAMICS OF FLEXIBLE WORK ARRANGEMENTS: THREE WAVES, REGIONAL DIVIDE, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The relevance of the study stems from the contradiction between the loud rhetoric of a mass return to the office and the actual dynamics of flexible work arrangements, which leaves it unclear for personnel management whether restructuring management systems for the hybrid format is a temporary anti-crisis adjustment or a structural task. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the global trajectory of the diffusion of flexible work arrangements over 2008–2025 and to substantiate the implications of the new equilibrium for personnel management systems. The study is based on the triangulation of independent open comparable data series on employee practices, employer demand and the employment structure, complemented by general scientific methods of systematisation, comparison, time series analysis and typological grouping. A criterion-based periodisation using trend breaks as boundaries is proposed: the waves of technological maturation, the pandemic-driven surge of 2020–2022, and the stabilisation of 2023–2025 at a level one and a half to four times above the pre-pandemic one. It is substantiated that this stabilisation constitutes a new equilibrium rather than an intermediate point of reversal. An original typology of country groups by levels and determinants of post-pandemic stabilisation is developed, with cultural individualism explaining the largest share of cross-country variation. The return-to-office collision is resolved through an asymmetric ratchet mechanism: factors that increased the prevalence of flexible formats do not operate in reverse after their disappearance. The IT sector is shown to move along the same trajectory ahead of the rest of the economy, both structurally and in the prevalence of flexible formats. The practical value of the results lies in substantiating that the redesign of personnel management subsystems for the hybrid format becomes a factor of employer competitiveness in the talent market, while flexibility policies of international companies require calibration to culturally different norms of autonomy and trust.