CURRENT TRENDS IN HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: REMOTE AND HYBRID EMPLOYMENT IN EUROPE (A PANEL ANALYSIS, 2015–2025)
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to identify the determinants of remote and hybrid employment in Europe and to test whether the post-pandemic level of working from home has become a new stable equilibrium rather than a temporary deviation. The relevance of the study stems from the persistent gap between corporate return-to-office narratives and official labour market statistics, as well as from the practical needs of human resource management, for which the choice between office, hybrid and remote regimes has become a standing strategic decision; for Ukraine, remote work has additionally served as a mechanism of preserving employment under wartime displacement. The research is based on a balanced country-level panel constructed from the harmonised Eurostat Labour Force Survey indicator of persons working from home (36 European countries, 2015–2025) combined with country-year data on household internet access, employment in knowledge-intensive services, job vacancy rates and real labour productivity. The methods include two-way fixed effects and random effects panel regressions with cluster-robust standard errors, an event-study specification measuring yearly deviations from the pre-pandemic baseline, and k-means clustering of national trajectories. The analysis distinguishes between-country differences in the level of remote work from within-country dynamics, examines the stability of national trajectories and the presence of convergence, and separates permanent remote arrangements from hybrid ones. The practical value of the article lies in substantiating the priorities of human resource management policy under hybrid work organisation, with managerial attention shifting from technological feasibility to the quality of hybrid work organisation, employee preferences and retention effects.
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