How a United States Air Force wing built a hybrid work model that balances organizational needs and employee wellbeing

• Date: 12 September 2024
• Pages: 367-384
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-02-2024-0029
• Published date: 12 September 2024
• Subject Matter: Health & social care,Healthcare management,HR & organizational behaviour,Human resource policy,Employee welfare
• Author: Melanie M. Lazarus,Joseph P. Nalepka

How a United States Air Force wing

built a hybrid work model that

balances organizational needs

and employee wellbeing

Melanie M. Lazarus

US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, USA, and

Joseph P. Nalepka

Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, USA

Abstract

Purpose –The results of the COVID-19 pandemic rendered the traditional work environment model obsolete

for the United States Air Force, resulting in the need to create a new hybrid work model that fits unique

employee needs in a complex organization. This practitioner article discusses how the 711th Human

Performance Wing (711 HPW) built the Mission-Focused Agile Work Environment (MFAWE) using a

combination of human and mission-focused strategies to ensure a more flexible work environment without

compromising excellence or its employees’ well-being.

Design/methodology/approach –Using an action research approach, data was collected by 77 diverse

stakeholders in six working groups. Five perspectives were examined – employee, operations, infrastructure,

leadership and mission – using a combination of literature and policy reviews, interviews, surveys and

personal experiences to deliver recommendations to leadership for implementation.

Findings –The MFAWE addressed hybrid work transition requirements, including employee guidance,

permanent workspace guidelines and facilities. Lessons learned from implementation included the need for a

change management and communication strategy. An employee playbook was found to be an effective

modality for information sharing but not for policy enforcement. Employee preference for permanent space

regardless of time on site due to sanitation and mental health concerns was also discovered.

Originality/value –This article showcases how a large, complex organization built a new hybrid work

model using employee-inclusive practices, filling a gap in the literature. This project also uncovered complex

interdependencies when transitioning to a hybrid work model, including employee preferences.

Keywords Hybrid work, Military, Employee health, Telework

Paper type Case study

Introduction

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions in the workplace. In the

United States (US), nearly all states issued stay-at-home orders to curtail the spread of the

International

Journal of

Workplace Health

Management

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© Melanie M. Lazarus and Joseph P. Nalepka. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is

published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce,

distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial

purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence

may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

The authors thank the members of the United States Air Force 711th Human Performance Wing,

including Mr. Charles Cambron, Mr. Todd Nelson, Mr. Michael Newman and Ms. Victoria Soulliere, for

their support.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the

official policy or position of the US Government, the Department of Defense or the United States Air

Force.

Institutional clearance: The material was assigned a clearance of CLEARED on 3 Jan 2023, Case

Number: AFRL-2024-0603.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/1753-8351.htm

Received 13 February 2024

Revised 14 April 2024

26 May 2024

Accepted 27 May 2024

InternationalJournal of Workplace

Health Management

Vol. 17 No. 4, 2024

pp. 367-384

Emerald Publishing Limited

1753-8351

DOI 10.1108/IJWHM-02-2024-0029

highly contagious virus, shutting down jobs deemed “nonessential” such as entertainment,

personal services and retail (Dey and Loewenstein, 2020). For those jobs capable of

conversion to the at-home environment, the COVID-19 pandemic spearheaded the necessity

for the ubiquitous implementation of telework, with the US Census Bureau estimating that

roughly 27.6mn people or 17.9% of the employed population were working from home,

tripling the number of at-home employees from 2019 to 2021 (United States Census

Bureau, 2022).

Telework is “a work flexibility arrangement under which an employee performs the

duties and responsibilities of such employee’s position, and other authorized activities, from

an approved worksite other than the location from which the employee would otherwise

work” (US Office of Personnel Management, 2022). During the height of the pandemic, US

employees were teleworking almost exclusively at home. Still, as governments lifted

restrictions with vaccinations becoming available, additional flexibilities such as hybrid

work models allowed a combination of working from home and in-person work in the office

(Beno, 2021).

Unlike many industries in the US that were introduced to the practice of telework and

hybrid work models for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States

federal government’s history with telework and hybrid work has spanned over 70 years, with

the earliest reference noted in 1957 (Joice, 2000). In 1973, the terms “teleworking” and

“telecommuting” were coined by consulting rocket scientist to the United States Air Force

(USAF), Jack Nilles, when he began to telecommute between Los Angeles and Washington,

D.C. (Nilles et al., 1976). Almost 30 years later, on December 9, 2010, US President Barack

Obama signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act (TEA), legislation that mandated the

implementation of telework and hybrid work policies by all executive agencies to increase

employee job satisfaction and retention while boosting productivity and addressing

environmental concerns (Telework Enhancement Act, 2010). Despite this mandate, the

implementation of the TEA was sporadic within much of the federal government (Randall,

2014), and it was not until the pandemic that telework became ubiquitous. Today, results of

the 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (N567,000) indicate that 68% of federal

employees still telework in some capacity, with 17% teleworking one or two days per week

and 14% every other week (Weisner, 2023).

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic’s dramatic effect on the way people work has pushed

telework and hybrid work to the forefront of research, with many factors under examination,

including hourly wage differentials (Pabilonia and Vernon, 2022), health and productivity

(Criscuolo et al., 2023), work intensity and emotional demands (Antunes et al., 2023) and

more. In an extensive systematic review by Mele et al. (2023), 120 studies across multiple

disciplines were examined, with self-reported productivity and work-life balance found to be

the most widely studied outcomes related to telework. Telework case studies have also been

reviewed in a handful of industries since the inception of the pandemic, such as an

exploration of the experiences of nonclinical hospital staff in telework status (Dooley, 2022), a

pilot program for New Jersey state workers (Fazelpoor, 2022) and contemplations on how

telework could be implemented in the US intelligence community despite security limitations

(Gioe, 2020).

However, despite the recent move to hybrid work models, which has yielded unique

research contexts in which many employees can decide their work location daily (Shao et al.,

2021), a significant gap in the literature exists as to how organizations can create or execute a

hybrid work model based on the unique needs of its employees. This manuscript is one of the

first of its kind, with only minimal work in this area done outside the US (Sampatet al., 2022).

The purpose of this practitioner manuscript is to present how an organization within the

US federal government, the 711th Human Performance Wing (711 HPW) under the USAF,

built a new hybrid work model called the Mission-Focused Agile Work Environment, based

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