In March 2022, the Minister for Defence announced that the ADF would grow by 18,500 personnel by 2040. To do so requires the ADF to double its current recruitment rates and maintain that rate for the next 20 years; an ambitious task given that the current targets have been missed for the previous ten years. This comes at a precarious time of increasing geopolitical tension and indications of large-scale conflict.
Complicating this expansion even further are increasing separations rates, where those needed to maintain Army’s most basic functions and knowledge-base are also those separating at the highest rates: junior non-commissioned officers and junior officers. How will the Army successfully grow when its experience and leadership are separating at an increasing rate? This essay explores the issue of retention, how it is currently being addressed, and highlights intrinsic issues that may be more responsible for separation than the allure of work external to the ADF.
With any discussion regarding retention, it is important to appreciate how immensely complicated the topic is. The infinite combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic factors unique to each individual make it very difficult to derive primary causes of separation. There is plenty of useful data on the Directorate of Workforce Management intranet page that provides trend analysis and general statistics of the workforce. Unfortunately, whilst this data provides an insight to the ‘what’ (the numbers), it doesn’t provide an insight to the ‘why’ (the reasons behind the numbers).
The analysis captures group trends across rank and corps; however, this is just the first step in isolating the problem. To provide a more holistic understanding, it would be useful to combine empirical statistics with subjective feedback (i.e., pulse surveys or transition interview summaries). In this way, the feedback (which is ultimately just an individual’s opinion) might be validated or negated by factual data. If an academic study was instigated to capture the trends in separation along with the reasons why personnel were discharging, then predominating causes would surface and could then be appropriately addressed.
Poor leadership is another important factor affecting retention, but given the personal nature of the topic, it is taboo to address within a hierarchy. A recent publication from the United States War College entitled ‘the Battalion Commander Effect’ (BCE) empirically demonstrates exactly how detrimental poor leadership is. The study captured the retention trends of lieutenants and correlated them to the battalion commanders they served under, using data from 1,745 battalion commanders and 36,032 lieutenants.
The models developed from this data demonstrate that each battalion commander had a statistically significant effect on the propensity for their lieutenants to remain in the Army beyond their initial minimum period of service, with the average retaining 59 percent (a BCE of 59). Moreover, when these models were modified to include the performance characteristics of the lieutenants, it was found that the effect was far more concerning; poor leadership from battalion commanders contributed to a significantly higher separation rate of the highest performing lieutenants, with the worst commanders retaining less than 10% of them.
Although this study focussed primarily on battalion commanders and lieutenants, it is reasonable to suggest that a similar correlation would exist between any rank within a chain of command, to varying levels of significance. Despite the widely known repercussions, very little is being done to identify or address poor leadership, and its effects are only magnified in an environment that is already suffering staff shortages. Nonetheless, within the Army’s analysis regarding retention, perhaps concepts like the BCE should be explored in an effort to put reason behind the data.
Oft quoted is that the ADF needs to be more competitive with the private sector in order to retain its talent, particularly regarding provisions for families, higher salaries and benefits, geographic stability, and flexible working arrangements. Several policies have been implemented in an effort to support this. The Total Workforce System was introduced to provide more options to render service to the ADF, shifting the predictable routine of service life away from its regimental origins and creating a more pliable workplace.
There is thus now a far greater ability to develop professionally and personally both within and external to the ADF. Whilst the objective success of this system is not known to the author, it is a step towards corporatising the ADF and levelling the playing field with competition from private industry. The Army Capability Retention Scheme (ACRS) offers a monetary incentive in exchange for an extended return of service obligation. This is attractive particularly for those who are enticed by the potential for higher salaries external to Defence (hence why it is targeted at critical trades); however, despite its effectiveness, it is costly and thus is unlikely to be a financially efficient means to affect the masses.
Competition with the private sector is not new. There has and always will be strong incentives created by government and corporate organisations alike to attract and retain a talented workforce. A lot of effort is placed in looking externally to find ways to be competitive; however, should an equal effort not be placed internally to capitalise on the positive things that make the ADF different? Given that work in the private industry is always a viable alternative, do increasing separation rates possibly suggest a decrease in the value people are finding in service life?
Ultimately, people choose to serve knowing that service life contains a completely different set of rules and opportunities, so perhaps it is disillusionment within the organisation itself as opposed to the allure of a life outside of the uniform that is causing talented soldiers and officers to leave.
One underappreciated issue affecting retention, is the insidious nature of bureaucratic inertia; the propensity for organisations to compound administrative processes despite the inefficiencies subsequently caused. This inertia is not something that exists only within the Army. Any organisation arranged into a hierarchy is at risk of its development, and it is no doubt just as prevalent in the civilian sector as it is within Defence.
Often times however, complaints of these inefficiencies are dismissed as a trivial matter, but the repercussions for which they are responsible are perhaps underestimated. The potential impacts of this can be drawn from an interesting anecdote from WWII. In 1944, the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS; the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) developed a manual entitled ‘simple sabotage’ to be given to OSS operatives to train citizen-saboteurs in occupied countries, such as France and Norway.
The manual addresses “the innumerable simple acts a citizen saboteur can perform” that will cause a “constant and tangible drag on the war effort of the enemy”, particularly those which may “harass and demoralise enemy administrators”. Specifically, to target organisations, the field manual proposes several damaging practices; to “insist on doing everything through channels” and to never “permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions”, to “refer all matters to committees”, to “bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible”, to “haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes and resolutions” and to defer decisions on the basis that it “might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon”.
Managers and supervisors were recommended to “demand written orders”, to “insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products”, to “lower morale”, to create duplicate files, and to “multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instruction” particularly those regarding basic administrative matters such as employee pay. Whilst it might be a comical parallel to draw, considering that much of the above is routine practice within the Army, perhaps it should be viewed with a degree of caution. If the OSS’s recommended protocols for sabotaging organisations are commonplace within our own, why are they dismissed as trivial matters?
Unfortunately, this is far from hyperbole; examples of such practices are widespread, impacting general administration and our ability to quickly plan and deliver output. Take for instance a ‘one-page health support plan’ that is in fact four-pages long. This demonstrates the seemingly innocent workings of bureaucratic inertia. Considering that what was once just a ‘health support plan’ has been renamed to a ‘one-page health support plan’ suggests that at some time, the document had been shortened, presumably to simplify it.
The fact that it has subsequently grown to be four pages long is self-evidently administrative inflation. Another example is found within unit administration matrices (that most units have), which are documents that designate what level of authority can approve specific administrative practices within that unit. In almost all cases, the designated authority in a unit administration matrix is one or two levels higher than it is within the overarching ADF policy: the Pay and Conditions Manual (PACMAN).
Regardless of the intent behind its implementation (most likely to minimise the risk of error by junior administrators) this causes several problems. Firstly, raising the delegate authority causes administration to pass through more hands, which multiplies the workload across the unit and ultimately delays the decision. Secondly, removing the authority from junior commanders removes exactly that; their authority, or at the very least their sense of it.
How is it that a lieutenant, entrusted to command personnel in conflict, is unable to approve basic administration within barracks (especially when the overarching policy says they can), and how are they to feel reassured that their judgement is sound and their authority legitimate when they realistically have very few opportunities to exercise them? Further, does the cause for such a document (inexperience and risk of administrative error by juniors) not raise a concern as to why this is the case? Does this not present itself as a gap in corporate knowledge that might be better remediated through professional development?
If not, how else are soon-to-progress junior commanders to develop a working understanding of these matters? Whilst it might appear far-fetched, there are tangible repercussions to such seemingly trivial matters, especially when multiplied across every aspect of administration and management.
Of all the issues that face an organisation tasked with defending Australia and its national interests, it makes sense that the embuggerance of administration might be low in the priority of concerns. However, with issues like retention perhaps the Pareto principle should be considered. Do the sidelined frustrations caused by bureaucratic inertia have a disproportionate effect on job satisfaction and organisational efficiency? If so, how can they be addressed?
Whilst a unit cannot throw the rulebooks out the window and revolutionise the workplace in its entirety, they can exploit every possible means of creating efficiency. If efficiency is considered to be of utmost importance, as the vital grease to the organisational gears, then any process deemed inefficient should be thoroughly investigated (perhaps the ‘simple sabotage field manual’ might serve as a baseline for what is inefficient). A unit can set in place blanket authorisation for any administration that recurs on a periodic basis and, where appropriate, replace antiquated minutes and briefs with an email, discussion, or phone call. They can provide adequate training and authority to junior commanders to allow them to action administration, and hence reduce the overall administrative workload of the unit. They can strive to reduce the frequency, length, and audience of conferences or even skip them if there is no genuine need; such as with planning conferences, where it may be quicker to disseminate instructions for planning responsibilities to the group in person.
Most importantly, they should genuinely consider the time penalty that some new piece of administration or process will have on the unit and seek to minimise it as much as possible. Whilst these measures are vague, the overall theme is assumed to be understood by the reader.
Simple arithmetic can determine how much time is spent doing mundane processes that detract from commanders focussing on their primary roles and provide a steady flow of frustration in the process. Whilst it may seem like a trivial component of the overall problem it is nonetheless a component and if it were really that trivial then it should be relatively simple to change. If small changes have the ability to reduce the workload of staff by even as little as 25% (which is a modest amount), then they should be exploited at every opportunity. As a point for thought: would another corporation turning over $32 billion annually dismiss the prospect of shortening the work it requires of staff by 25%?
Retention is in no way a simple problem to address. It is an incredibly complex multivariate issue that fluctuates in a near unpredictable manner. Whilst we look externally to see what may be attracting members away from the organisation and seek to offer similar incentives to keep them in, we mustn’t forget to look internally to see what is detrimental to the value of service life. Ultimately, people seek meaningful work, and when they find themselves doing things that are difficult to perceive as meaningful, they become disillusioned and begin to look elsewhere. The effect of bureaucratic inertia may be just one element amongst the plethora of other issues that are contributing to the current retention rates, but is an issue nonetheless and should be treated as such. If the ADF is to successfully grow it needs to retain those already holding rank to avoid becoming hollow in the middle, and to achieve that, it cannot allow for the intrinsic value of service life to be questioned.
1. Reduce micromanagement, it is endemic. This is not surprising where one in four are officers and we have 200+ star ranked pers (all SERCATS). Give junior leaders more authority.
2. Better employ what we have and stop treating pers a sunk cost. Companies track how effective time is used and expect pers to be 80% + on their primary role. Army red tape, over training, compliance, and inefficient processes means pers are lucky to spend 30% of time on their core job.
3. Fix the rank/trade imbalances. When first year LTs are acting company 2ICs and first year CPLs acting PL SGTS, we have an issue. It stifles their developments, takes them off the tools, loads them with admin and demoralises the individual.
4. Disband units if not staffed to 70% +. Anything else results in understaffed unit pers being burnt out, loaded with many jobs, while trying to meet compliance and tasking needs. This makes more pers discharge, placing added burden on those holding the fort, eventually something breaks.
5. Fix the management of high priority positions, reward those in these roles and reconsider the need to post pers every 2-3 years. When you force SERCAT 7 into an undesirable posting, they commence exit planning. For a SERCAT 5, they just go inactive.
6. Locate units where people want to reside, and jobs are available for partners. Some locations will always be undesirable and encourage pers to leave rather than move.
7. Reduce the number of HQs and stop raising brigades; each generates its own admin overhead, reduces pers available to units, slows C2 and creates hollow formations.
8. Fix the teeth to tail ratio. Too many pers are in roles that do not directly generate combat capability; consider a KPI such as 70% of Army must be in a Brigade unit.
9. Fix the DPN, it is slow, unreliable, frustrating, not enterprise grade and like stepping back 20 years. I get more outages in a month on CIOG networks than in ten years on private company systems. Lost productivity at ~30 min/day across all SERCATs equates to a brigade a year of pers. If a bank or on-line retailer provided such as poor service, their business would collapse.
10. Fix SSO management; we want their skills but abandon them during civil schooling, poorly train them, provide little leadership then fail to effectively integrate them into units. They quickly become disconnected and exit Army.
11. Improve change management. Army changes processes, system or policy and assumes the unit “absorbs” the staff burden. And change is rarely completed or measured before the next leader with a bright idea turns the wheel again.
12. Reduce governance; it impossible for any commander to understand, let alone complete compliance needs.
13. Improve integration between full and part-time units. For the Total Workforce Model to succeed, it needs to be more than a transition to retirement for staff moving to SERCAT 3 on special projects.
14. Fix how we on on-board, train and integrate new pers. Civilian companies do this in hours or days. Many perspective Army recruits are disengaged before they even complete their recruitment process. Then they wait months to complete training and integrate into a unit.
15. Improve opportunities for critical trades. In areas such as cyber, the monetary bonus cannot compete with the private sector. The job needs to be interesting and meaningful, not stuck in a basement in Canberra, especially as pers can get double the salary doing the job as a civilian.
16. Increase UN peacekeeping and other deployments. Pers want to deploy on ops and the UN provides this opportunity. We sit towards the bottom of the pack for troop contributions.
2. What is the percentage of our people that are unaccompanied? I know is it very high at the senior soldier level. Young soldiers look at this and probably think that this could be them in the future. We marry our partners because we want to be with them for the rest of our lives, not just see them 6-7 times a year.
3. More employment opportunities for our broken people. If we break them it must be our responsibility to look after them. Why can't someone with broken knees stay in Defence in a job that does not require going field.
4. My other concern is that the senior officers are not reading this or getting the message from our people. All they get is filtered down responses from the CoC and the more levels, the more filtered down it is.
Further, the conditions of service that existed when I first joined (2001) have largely eroded away (example: wait times for a GP/Dentist visit exceeding 3 weeks). I am lucky to have MSBS, but the new soldiers access a worse scheme. DOHAS is great when you are paid well, but many banks will not loan much more than $500,000 to junior to mid rank ORs. Good luck buying a house in most of the major centers for that. DHA houses are great, if you can get one, but as an OR, they are likely to be further out. With capital city traffic, many of my soldiers in Melbourne had upwards of an hour drive each way.
OR's are increasingly aware that they have a job, while Officer's have a career. This is especially true in the Signals trades, where most GSOs (at many levels) have inadequate understanding of the capabilities under their command, yet have decision making authority, are paid significantly more, and usually just rubber stamp the SNCOs decisions. The difference between job and career is commonly described as the ability to move into a decision making role. ORs, no matter how senior, are not permitted to be a decision maker without officer oversight.
Technology companies outside the ADF look at the Signals ORs and see educated, trained, experienced, disciplined, technically competent leaders who are task orientated and work well alone or in team environments.
Using myself as an example, the Army paid me $107, 600. I was working 60+ hour weeks, and unable to borrow enough to purchase a home in Canberra. I now work as a senior technical executive, with financial powers, on 38hrs a week, a named car park, and paid in excess of $200,000, plus super, bonuses, shares. My next role (funnily enough) will not be a financial decision, as now it is not only about the money.
The retention bonuses offered by the Army to the Signals trades is laughable in the current environment - $70,000 for 3 years, or $50,000 for 2 years. Take the average soldiers (CPLs) who discharged over the last 3 years (that I personally know) - Army $90,000, civilian average they left for was $160,000 with bonuses, WFH etc.
For Army to be an employer of choice requires a complete overhaul, and Army needs to accept that it is not uncommon in the civilian sector for the technical workers to be paid better and have better conditions than the managers above them. It is a shame the technical warrant and specialist soldier schemes are still limited, neutered trials.
Also some good insights on the opportunity to do a better job with SERCAT 5 as a means to retain skills and provide a pathway to enter or return to full time service. This would be better than purely relying on DFR to continuously bring new people who don’t really know what they are getting themselves into, that need to be fully trained from recruit training and are a much more long term and expensive solution.
After 30+ years I have had enough and pulling the pin, it’s been a great job. But the extended admin burden on almost everything we do is taking its toll on me. I don’t want to talk for others though.
As I start my exit it truely does amaze me how much stupid the organisation contains how much is on the member to be an expert of everything but their core role, think travel, pers admin, allowances, etc
I have worked outside twice before where results matter and I intend to do so again. The satisfaction of a job done in your core field is something I recommend to anyone, sadly that is to dar between in ADF.
Additionally, the careerism of these senior officers ensured nobody rocked the boat, but that is another discussion entirely.
Who would stay in an organization where the harder you work and more productive you are, the less opportunities you get and the worse you get treated?
*I have to even say this anonymously as within the ADF you will be punished fir even uttering this kind of truth.