The contemporary post-COVID-19 corporate environment of instant response and hybrid work settings motivates employees to learn to adjust their expectations. This new corporate working model incorporates flex locations and flex schedules by working at home 1–2 days per week and staying connected for non-urgent requests, even outside business hours. This work setting empowers employees to prioritize work accordingly and to accommodate the fluid schedules of their coworkers. As a result, this new hybrid workplace requires leaders and their teams to face new challenges in terms of communication, coordination, and team connection to remain effective. This research examines the experiences of employees in an SME that applied a hybrid work policy following the post-pandemic crisis, bringing additional complexity to their modern work system. This study investigates employees’ views on the changing work environment as important evidence for HR management to incorporate into future organizational practices. To understand the various principles at play and provide more granular results, this paper includes a business case study (N = 25) where semi-structured interviews were used to identify the views and concerns of employees regarding hybrid work settings. The scope of this case study was to collect empirical data regarding this new agile way of working while understanding participant thinking. The findings suggest that while there are clear benefits in terms of efficiency and flexibility in hybrid work settings, there are also challenges related to social interactions and non-verbal clues. This study enhances conceptual and empirical understanding and supports contemporary research on the future of work.

Our world now faces significant challenges including complex issues arising from human–machine interaction. This paper explores how we could address these challenges using a new approach called Cybernetics 3.0. This approach highlights human agency and the co-evolution of humans and machines, particularly regarding how we make decisions. Rather than viewing machines as separate from people, Cybernetics 3.0 views machines as extensions of human action, which is vital in our complex world. This paper argues that when this approach is combined with advanced Web 3.0 technologies, we can create better decision-making systems that integrate both human values and machine capabilities. This paper uses diagrams to illustrate how human and machine decision-making are interconnected and provides a healthcare example to demonstrate the practical value of this framework. Through a holistic and systems thinking approach, we can foster sustainable and wise decisions that will promote human flourishing and planetary health. The discipline of cybernetics is a promising way to better understand the interaction between humans and technology via its focus on systems of control, human–AI learning and communication, feedback loops, self-regulating systems, and knowledge enhancement in humans and machines. Ultimately this approach could help us to address critical issues such as inequality, climate change, and other complex threats to our planet and society.

This paper examines the framework of Cybernetics 3.0 as a way of addressing grand challenges related to human-machine interaction in complex systems. The paper explores the evolution of Cybernetics and highlights the limitations of the earlier versions. The current approach to Cybernetics, Cybernetics 3.0, focuses upon human agency and the co-evolution of humans and machines in the decision-making space. The paper argues that this approach when combined with Web 3.0 technologies gives new ways to optimise decision-making by integrating human capabilities and ethical considerations with machine capabilities. The paper uses causal loop diagrams to demonstrate the factors leading to interconnectedness between human and machine decision-making. A practical example from the field of healthcare illustrates the interconnections and demonstrates the utility of this framework for more sustainable and wise decisions. A holistic systems thinking approach in addressing grand challenges such as these could promote human flourishing, and the discipline of Cybernetics is a promising way to better understand the interaction and its potential, through its focus on systems of control, human AI learning and communication, feedback loops, self-regulating systems, and knowledge enhancement in humans and machines.

The movement of “silent quitting” and the “great resignation” are trends of the post covid era when the lockdowns triggered a shift in the way that many employees viewed their workplace. According to Hopkins and Figaro (2021), with long periods of lockdowns and isolation, workers took the opportunity to reevaluate their lives and priorities and request sustainable organizational practices. Those practices enabled collaborative working processes and relationships and lead to a corporate culture that promote a stable workplace, with cohesive leadership that results in performance (Vargas-Hernandez, 2022). Our research applies Gestalt phenomenological diagnosis along with empirical data, in order to identify the interdependencies among corporate culture, subcultures and leadership style, and presents a causal work diagram illustrating the many and varied interconnections to obtain organizational sustainability. This paper contributes to the growing body of work in the area of organizational diagnosis, by understanding the Gestalt awareness process of the organizational consultant. Our research adds empirical evidence to the above concepts and provides new ways of thinking about the complexity of corporate culture via applying Gestalt practices and allowing the full self of the consultant in the assessment process.

Organizations operate as dynamic social systems in which organizational culture and perceptions of organizational justice interact through feedback mechanisms to generate emergent collective behavior. This chapter applies a systems dynamics perspective to a research case to examine how organizational culture and justice function as coupled subsystems within organizational boundaries, shaping microlevel interactions and producing system-level behavioral patterns over time. Drawing on systems dynamics principles, this chapter proposes a causal model in which cultural assumptions shape fairness expectations and justice perceptions which influence interaction quality through reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, and accumulated microinteractions give rise to emergent structures that feed back into and reshape cultural stocks over time. Semistructured interviews with 27 employees in a major Greek manufacturing organization produced two primary empirical themes: organizational culture (marked by tensions between control and empowerment, metrics and values, and wellness versus performance pressure) and organizational justice (covering fairness and meritocracy, transparency and trust, participation and influence, and conflict resolution). The findings demonstrate that organizational justice does not operate autonomously but is deeply integrated into how organizational culture is shaped and experienced. Leadership emerges as a critical leverage point between formal systems and lived experience, while participation in decision-making functions as a key indicator of fairness perception. Theoretically, the chapter contributes to organizational scholarship by modeling organizational culture and justice as dynamically coupled variables within a single system, and demonstrates the utility of systems dynamics frameworks for understanding nonlinear organizational phenomena.