Abstract
With the development of information technologies and increasing interest in sustainability, many companies have adopted smart work as a sustainable human resource practice. Moreover, the outbreak of COVID-19 has further promoted smart work in the workplace. However, the benefits and disadvantages of smart work are still under debate. In this regard, this study attempted to delve into how to enhance smart work implementation by exploring employees’ subjectivity. Hana Tour, which is considered a good model of smart work in South Korea, was selected as a sample company. Q-methodology was employed to listen to employees’ subjective opinions about smart work that they experienced. This study identified five types of smart work perceptions, namely, “self-development and energy saving,” “quality of personal life,” “job satisfaction,” “work engagement,” and “work–life balance”. Based on these five types, the theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the last chapter. Interestingly, the results showed that employees were not well aware of smart work effectiveness as one of the environmental protection practices in sustainability management paradigms. Another notable result was that employees were not concerned about the potential penalties of their engagement in smart work. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, the study’s findings are beneficial to the improvement of smart work implementation as a sustainable HRM practice in business.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralSustainable human resource management—“Sustainable HRM”—is a sustainable personal system to achieve three core values of economic, social and environmental factors from “The 2030 agenda for sustainable development goals (SDGs)” announced by the UNGeneral Assembly in 2015 [1,2]
A total of 25 Hana Tour employees who engaged in smart work were classified into 5 types based on their subjectivity
This study revealed that in a smart work system, employees feel that they receive unique welfare benefits that cannot be found in other companies, and this can be significantly linked to increasing job satisfaction
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralSustainable human resource management—“Sustainable HRM”—is a sustainable personal system to achieve three core values of economic, social and environmental factors from “The 2030 agenda for sustainable development goals (SDGs)” announced by the UNGeneral Assembly in 2015 [1,2]. Its main goal is to create employee value, such as enhancing employees’ working conditions, employee capacity, health care, work–life balance, wellbeing, and justice in the workplace [3]. From this viewpoint, smart work can be considered one of the useful sustainable HR practices, since the basic idea of smart work is to actualize an ideal workplace to improve employees’ well-being and overall quality of life [4,5]. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there had already been time and resources invested to develop smart work with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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