Comparative analysis of hybrid work dynamics in selected European tech companies : challenges, cultural shifts, and employee well-being

Abstract

During the period of COVID-19, a lot of technology-based companies switched to remote work. From then on, the employer and the employee adopted the remote working culture to acknowledge this situation. Later, they tried to shift from remote working to a hybrid one, where certain days of on-site office work were maintained for different reasons. This research will explore how major European tech companies adopted the hybrid working culture from a fully remote one and how they take care of employee well-being and cultural shifts by using the case study model. This also analyzes the impact of adopting the hybrid work model on both employees and management inside the leading tech companies in Europe, namely SAP, Spotify, and Ericsson. These three companies were chosen for the case studies, as they provide relevancy and strong implementation of hybrid work with the availability of secondary data. Moreover, this study explores and investigates how these organizations are reshaping and restructuring their working setup during COVID and post-COVID and adopting the hybrid one from secondary data sources such as newspapers, companies’ newsroom blogs, social media communications, and academic journals. It also focuses on conducting comparisons among their different hybrid work strategies, impact on institutional culture, how the collaboration is made, the challenges they face, and the well-being of the employee, along with their feedback. The key findings provide valuable insights about the practical approaches taken by these companies regarding their implementation of hybrid work policies, such as their strategic implementation of policies and design and establishment of modern, robust digital tools for the connectivity of transparent and better communication. It also discussed the challenges they faced, like how SAP faced the resistance about their decision of mandatory RTO, maintaining team bonding in the distributed model adopted by Spotify, and balancing onsite R&D needs with concerns about digital security by Ericsson. This research contributes to the understanding of the hybrid working model in the context of Europe, offering deep and practical insights about how these companies navigate the challenges to adopt the hybrid working model and validation of existing literature about the working model, which offers flexibility.