A Human Resource Management Practice on Working Remotely During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 caused great effects on public health and unprecedented losses to economies and labour markets. Companies mostly chose working remotely rather than laying employees off. However, COVID-19 introduced radical changes to all aspects of life. Regarding workplace, human resources practices are not enough for managing behaviour, motivation, and competencies of the employees working remotely. In addition, the workplace's design is not in compliance with regulations newly made by national and international authorities. Towards this end, this chapter discusses the design of the office that will be used during and after pandemic. Meanwhile, the chapter discusses human resources practices that may be employed in order to facilitate the process of working remotely.

Long-term Resilient Labour Strategies to Deal with the Economic Crisis in Europe Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

The crisis has had a negative impact on both European economies and labour markets with different effects among countries, raising the importance of analysing the labour market resilience. This paper seeks to identify which strategies and labour adjustments have led European labour markets to both resilient and non-resilient results by using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The findings show two different configurations explaining 57% of the resilient cases and four configurations explaining 74% of the non-resilient cases. The results of this study revealed three important issues. First of all, the same strategy was found to have different results on labour markets. This fact stressed that the context in which different measures are imposed is a decisive factor in their success. Secondly, resilient strategies underlined the importance of “flexibility”, by increasing temporary employment together with other conditions to escape from the crisis. Finally, the non-resilient results stress the importance of the imbalance between the flexicurity dimensions and the effect of the fall in economic activity on not being resilient in the long-term.

‘Dual’ labour market? Patterns of segmentation in European labour markets and the varieties of precariousness

This article aims to empirically explore how European labour markets are segmented and who the outsiders are. The article moves beyond the dichotomous approach to understanding labour market division, often based solely on examining employment relationships. Taking a multi-dimensional approach to defining labour market precariousness, this study incorporates aspects such as income, job prospects and subjective insecurity. Latent Class Analysis is used on data taken from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey to extend the traditional definition of outsider-ness. Four labour market segments are found: insiders and three different types of outsiders: typical outsiders, dead-end insiders and subjective outsiders. Looking at the cross-national aspect, variations are found in the segmentation patterns, especially in terms of who the outsiders are. The findings show the need to examine various aspects of labour precariousness in order to capture the complexity of post-industrialised labour markets and identify different types of outsiders across Europe that need to be protected for building a more cohesive society.

An Analysis of Underemployment among Young Graduates: The Case of a Higher Education Institution in South Africa

Labour markets have undergone vast transformations over the last few years. There are arguments that employment and unemployment measures have not been adequate in understanding the complexities of labour markets. Research on labour underutilisation has focused on one side of the spectrum, which is just about the scarcity of jobs. However, there is more to the labour market than just scarcity of jobs, and many researchers believe unemployment is not a complete measurement of unused labour capacity, which is why this study aimed to investigate the existence of underemployment from the perceptions of young graduates themselves. In this regard, the definition of young people entailed those younger than 35 years as officially defined in South Africa. The study employed a primary data method of data collection in which an online survey was used to collect the necessary data from the alumni database of a South African university. The study used binary logistic regression to determine factors that contributed to or influenced underemployment status. The main findings indicated that underemployment was rife according to age, where younger graduates (20–29 years) were more likely to be underemployed compared to their more mature counterparts; that is, those in the 30–34 age category, with non-White graduates most likely to encounter underemployment compared to their counterparts. This study resulted in important findings that carry significant policy implications and recommendations that may be crucial in correcting the current employment mismatches in the South African graduate labour market.

Comparison of changes in the labour markets of post-communist countries with other EU member states

strengthen their international competitiveness. This was linked to the implementation of institutional and economic reforms, significant technological changes and improvements in the quality of human capital, as well as fiscal stabilisation policies. These changes affected their situation in the labour market. Purpose of the article: The aim of the study is to assess changes in the situation in the labour market in the EU with particular emphasis on the post-communist countries in the period 2002? 2019. Methods: The situation of countries in the European labour market was estimated using the TOPSIS method. A similarity matrix of changes in the composite variable for each country was then constructed using the Dynamic Time Warping method. On its basis, homogeneous clusters of countries were determined using the Ward?s method. Findings & value added: Four homogenous clusters of countries were formed. The post-communist ones belonged to two groups. In one, there were two countries ? Croatia and Slovakia. The rest of the post-communist countries were in a large cluster, which also included Germany, Malta, Finland, Portugal, France and Belgium. Changes of the situation in the post-communist countries in this group improved very much during the analysed period (this was particularly evident for Czechia, Estonia and Poland). It is interesting to investigate whether the reaction of labour markets to changes in the global economic situation in post-communist countries is similar to that in the old EU countries. The similarity of changes can be measured using the DTW method. There is an empirical research gap in this respect. Therefore, the added value is the use of this method in assessing similarities of changes in the labour market situation in post-communist countries in comparison to the Western European ones.