'Spread the Word' team addresses workforce concerns

Published Nov. 20, 2008
By Derek Kaufman
88th Air Base Wing Public Affairs

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- The commander of the Air Force Personnel Center brought her Spread the Word briefing team here Nov. 12 to 14 to communicate personnel changes with diverse groups of customers.

Maj. Gen. K. C. McClain is traveling with the team initially to each Air Force base with a major command headquarters and joint combatant command headquarters.

Eventually, the briefing team will visit every Air Force Base. General McClain said the team wants to meet first-hand with Airmen and civilians to share important personnel updates and to seek feedback from the workforce.

"Our objectives are twofold," General McClain said. "First, we want to talk to our customers and help them understand what is happening in the personnel community. Second, it gives our customers an opportunity to talk to us. We want to hear what their issues and concerns are so we can work them."

During their visit here, the Spread the Word team was able to tailor their message in direct exchanges to audiences at the Air Force Institute of Technology, National Air and Space Intelligence Center and Wright-Patterson Medical Center, before conducting a mass briefing Nov. 14 at the base theater.

The team of military and civilian personnel experts covered topics ranging from Air and Space Expeditionary Force, or AEF, to deployment tempo bands, to 365-day deployment tours, to officer and enlisted assignments, to civilian staffing changes and developmental education opportunities.

"We are dedicated to our first priority of developing our Airmen to ensure the Air Force has the right person at the right time with the right skills," General McClain said.

She acknowledged that 365-day deployments for Airmen, first implemented in 2004, were not well understood. Thus, the Spread the Word team responded by communicating in greater detail why deployments are necessary and how they work.

The general said feedback she received during a recent meeting with Airmen deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility underscored the importance for personnel officials and unit deployment managers to work closely together to ensure people are deployment ready.

"Unit deployment managers are critical to a good deployment," General McClain said. "Some individuals relayed that their UDM was the best and he made sure that they got to the AOR with all of their requirements met ... and then I had some who said quite frankly their UDMs weren't very helpful. So we took that note and are meeting with all UDMs to help them understand how important they are, and how critical they are to the success of an individual's deployment."

Another topic of discussion centered around consolidating Air Force personnel functions.

"We are changing," General McClain said of her AFPC team at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas.

Traditionally, AFPC had been a headquarters function that translates Pentagon policy into executable personnel programs implemented by personnel offices at each base. Now, personnel reductions across the Air Force along with base realignment and closure decisions have driven consolidation of a number of key personnel functions previously accomplished by base personnel offices.

So AFPC specialists are doing actual customer service production work, such as accomplishing DD Form 214s for separating service members and developing lists of potential civil service hiring candidates for base-level selection officials.

Additionally, the AEF Center at Langley AFB, Va., recently combined with AFPC. The consolidation was accomplished a month ahead of schedule and $1 million under budget, General McClain said, but hard work remains ahead.

"All of the consolidation work is going to be challenging," she said. "It requires in-depth planning and also resourcing. And that's the key. It's how to ensure the requirements are still met as we try to maximize the resources needed to do those requirements. It's incumbent that we do planning from both sides and that everyone understands their roles."

Beyond mass briefings, the Spread the Word team met in roundtable discussions with their Wright-Patterson civilian personnel counterparts to discuss changing roles and responsibilities, along with "where the seam points are and how to smooth those seam points," General McClain said. She called the exchange an excellent opportunity to refine processes and enhance understanding on how to execute the personnel mission.

Following the Spread the Word Team's mass briefing, a number of Airmen and civilians asked questions and identified concerns.

Responding to questions about the future of migrating Air Force civilians from the General Schedule to the National Security Personnel System, or NSPS, the team acknowledged examples of benefits to both systems but noted that the Department of Homeland Security did elect to abandon its original NSPS implementation plans and go back to the GS system. This was in part due to challenges associated with performance documentation.

"When you do pay-for-performance, good or bad, you got to have a system and a process," said Jim Hale of AFPC's civilian force integration directorate. "This one requires lots of documentation."

Officials said the future of NSPS likely will be scrutinized in 2009 under the new administration and remain in flux until then.

Capt. David Diercks, a contracts negotiator with Aeronautical System Center's 577th Aeronautical Systems Group, recently returned from an overseas deployment and voiced his concern that Air Force contracting officers are likely to be placed in AEF Tempo Band "E" with a one-to-one dwell time, meaning they could expect to deploy for six months, then spend six months at their home station before becoming vulnerable to deploy again.

Spread the Word briefer Col. Chris Sharpe acknowledged that 91,900 Air Force enlisted members, 21,400 officers and 400 civilian employees deployed in fiscal 2007 in support of combatant commander requirements.

The new AEF construct uses a tempo-based rule set which assigns functional area unit type codes to one of five tempo bands. The baseline, tempo band "A," utilizes a 1:4 deploy-to-dwell tempo.

Tempo bands "B" through "E" were added to provide predictability and rule sets for the nearly 50 percent of functional areas currently operating at a tempo greater than 1:4 or for a duration greater than 120 days. Those are postured in bands "B" through "E" in six month blocks, at a 1:4, 1:3, 1:2 and 1:1 deploy-to-dwell respectively.

Security forces, Office of Special Investigations and contracting are just a few of the functional areas facing very high deployment tempo.

Colonel Sharpe said an entire career field generally isn't in the same tempo band together. While personnel officials work hard to find volunteers, tempo band determinations boil down to an algebra problem of matching requirements against available resources. He said tempo bands for a number of functional areas are still being finalized.

"Within a functional career field -- you can take the intelligence career field for instance -- certain parts will be in band "E" but other parts could be in Band "A" depending on how big the requirement is for that specialty," Colonel Sharpe said.

One civilian who volunteered to deploy in support of the surge for Operation Iraqi Freedom said there is a large cadre of civilians who want to do their part in a deployed environment and that DOD and Air Force officials have been too slow releasing policy guidance for the Civilian Expeditionary Corps proposed by President George Bush.

Team members agreed but added that there are many details to be worked before DOD officials seek to replace many deployed military authorizations with civilians.

Tech. Sgt. Lisa Coker, a personnel specialist currently assigned to the 88th Air Base Wing command chief's office, said she found the team's visit to be very informative. One of her observations was that the AFPC questions Web site, known as "Ask AFPC," was difficult to navigate. She recommended improving the site and having the team demonstrate it in future base briefings.

"If they could just streamline that a little bit, make it a little more user friendly, I think they'll be spot on," Sergeant Coker said.

Many personnel questions are answered at the AFPC "Ask" Web site. For individual personnel questions, Air Force members should contact the Air Force Contact Center at (800) 616-3775.

Spread the Word team visit