Research for Attrition

In recent years, the Seabee community-the Navy's 'construction force'-has become concerned about its ability to retain skilled enlisted personnel. It fears that the Seabees' expanded mission, hectic deployment schedule, and harsh work environments have created retention and manning difficulties, which will worsen due to recent sea pay increases for seagoing personnel. In response to these concerns, NAVFAC asked CNA to assess whether an additional Seabee compensation is warranted and, if so, to recommend appropriate pay delivery vehicles. For mid- and senior-grades, the Seabee sea retention and manning environments are generally similar to or worse than those experienced by similarly skilled shipboard personnel. Yet recent sea pay enhancements are designed to address fleet recruiting, retention, and manning problems. As such, they will provide a "fix" for the problems facing the shipboard groups, but will not improve Seabee conditions since Seabees do not receive sea pays during sea tours. Providing the Seabees with a pay comparable in size to sea pay enhancement would cost $2.9 to $4.3 million annually, depending on whether it targets manning shortfalls or is equally distributed. The most promising near-term compensation vehicles for this pay would be an increase in the meals or incidental expenses portion of per diem for Seabees, whereas a long-term fix might require the implementation of a distribution incentive pay with targeted Selective Reenlistment Bonus.

CNA performed the Navy Specilaty Physician Study at the request of the Navy Surgeon General. The objective of the study was to further explore retention of Navy physicians, by identifying and tracking critical indicators of Navy physician retention, to provide BUMED information for improving personnel policy business practices. Years of practice in specialty, percent board certified, number of residents and fellows, and demographics are some of the critical indicators we tracked by specialty. In recognition of the typical career path of Navy physicians, our retention analysis considered matriculation and attrition rates. We found that the matriculation rate of newly trained specialists has improved since FY 1987. We believe this is a result of the April 1988 active duty GME obligation policy change. To provide policy-makers some context and comparison for our findings, we explored some of the physician recruitment and retention strategies being used in the civilian sector. This information will help policy-makers better understand the Navy's competitive position when it competes for physicians.

This briefing on attrition was presented to the Navy Human Resources Board of Directors in June 2000. While one of its purposes was to raise the awareness level of the attrition problem among the Navy's senior leadership, we concentrated on how the Navy can change its system so that the attrition issue is raised in importance at lower levels in the command structure, even when the senior leadership is focused on other issues. We organized our suggestions/recommendations into two categories-improving accountability within the system and incentives.

This paper attempts to clarify the relationships among the following four hypotheses: (1) the number of material failures across intervals of calendar time containing equal accumulated flight hours follows a Poisson distribution; (2) the number of elapsed flight hours between successive independent material failures follows an expotential distribution; (3) the expected number of monthly material failures is exactly proportional to monthly flight hours; and (4) the observed number of monthly material failures is strongly correlated with monthly flight hours.