The United States Navy is among the major branches of the United States Armed forces which is tasked with the defense of the USA at the sea, and seaborne support of the country’s military service. The Navy is further tasked with maintaining of security on the seas within which the interests of the USA extends. It forms one of the seven uniformed forces in the USA and is considered the largest and strongest Navy globally with the highest combined battle fleet tonnage. The Navy was established during the American Revolutionary war with its origin being the continental Navy, before being disbandment as a separate entity before long. It is considered to have played a crucial role during the American Civil war through blockading the confederacy and seizure of rivers control. Additionally, the navy was effectively deployed during the second world war. Presently, the Navy maintains a significant worldwide presence, with deployment in areas including Western Pacific, the Mediterranean, as well as the Indian Ocean.
In terms of the structure, in 1949, the department of Navy was placed within the department of defense through amendments of the National Security Act of 1947. The navy encompasses the US marine corps and in the time of war, the U.S. Coast Guard. Generally, the structure of the Navy is composed of four primary bodies, “the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, the operating forces and the Shore Establishment.” Civilian secretary of the Navy is at the helm of the entity and is appointed by the president in the capacity of Commander in Chief. The chief of the naval operations, the senior military officer, advises the commander in chief and the secretary. The officer is also a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commands navy’s operating forces (with the exception of Marine Corps, in addition to directing the naval reserve. From 2010, the navy’s forces were distributed among six numbered fleets around the globe: “the Third (Pacific Fleet), the Fourth (Southern Command), the Fifth (Central Command), the Sixth (U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa), the Seventh, and the Tenth (Cyber Command).”
Understaffing problem within The Navy
One agency problem affecting the United States Navy is lack of adequate manpower. The Armed forces branch has experienced manpower problem for more than a decade. According to Saxena (2017) a report published by the Federal government Accountability office in 2017 revealed that the agency had been experiencing a staffing shortage leading to significant understaffing of the portside ships. Consequently, the sailors have experience burnout due to being overstressed and overworked. According to Pierce (2017), the problem became of understaffing in the Navy has persisted for long and some of the major cause of the problem include shrinking fiscal environment, adapting to the expectation as well as changing perspective brought to the agency by the millennial sailors, the need for speed as well as the precision required to match people to job opportunities. Murphy, (2010) on the other hand perceive the problem as being a result of the reality to that maintenance of manpower and personnel-related legacy information technology (IT) systems which impedes strategic IT investment, as well as the realization that the cost of manpower is among the largest component of the Navy budget. As expressed by GAO (2017), the Navy started embarking on the reduction crew sizes around 17 years ago with a view of increasing efficiency but eventually, created the understaffing problem.
Reduction of the number of employees is normally aimed at increasing efficiency. However, as expressed by Brickley, Smith and Zimmerman (2016), it is not always that such actions improves efficiency and often, costs can increase. For instance, according to GAO (2017) report, in the optimal manning period for the army (2003 to 2012), total ship operating costs which encompasses personnel and maintenance costs, and maintenance backlogs increases substantially and continue to increase as shown in figure 1 below. As the Navy sought to implement the optimal manning, the size of the crew reduced, decreasing the associated personnel costs for majority of ships classes, despite the crews beign partially restored. Despite of this, increased maintenance costs were compensated by reduction in personel costs as figure 1 illustrates. According to Navy officials, the increase in maintenance costs were attributable to reduced crews, longer deployment among other factors.
Figure 1: Changes in Annual personnel and maintenance costs from Optimal manning period to 2015.
Source: GAO (2017)
The understaffing problem at the Navy can further be explained using the concept of demand and supply. According to Brickley, Smith and Zimmerman (2016), the demand for labor in the market is a derived one where it results from commodities it aids in the production. The greater the consumer’s demand for the product, the greater the producer’s demand for the labor required in making it. In the case of Navy, the service provided, i.e. defense, determine the demand for the labor. For instance, when the country is facing or anticipating a security threat, the more the demand for labor would increase. Hence, economic wise, the elasticity of demand for labor is dependent on the elasticity of demand for the output. Additionally, the demand for labor can be dependent on n the prices of the co-operating factors. For instance for the Navy, the cost of equipment such as ships would determine the labor requirement, where high cost of equipment would imply employment of more labor. Technical progress also affect the demand for labor where the introduction of technology reduces the demand for labor.
On the other hand the supply for labor implies the various number of workers of a given form of labor which are willing to offer themselves for employment at various prevailing rates. The supply of labor can be viewed in two ways; supply to the industry and supply to the entire economy. For a given industry like the army, the labor supply is elastic where if the industry wants more labor, it is capable of attracting it from other industries by offering a higher wage. For the navy for instance, it would attract labor from other industries such as teaching, nursing among others. Another way is through working the existing work force for overtime. Such measures would increase supply and reduce the understaffing. On the other hand, the supply of labor in the entire economy, for instance that of the whole of the United States, is reliant on economic, social and political factors or institutional factors such as attitude of one gender towards work, age, school leaving age as well as the possibility of overtime. The supply of labor in the economy can decline when workers refuse to work for a time which can result due to labor being organized to trade unions.
There exists a number of ways in which the understaffing problem can be controlled at the Navy. The Navy itself has attempted to come with initiative through which the problem can be addressed. For instance, through the Reducing Administrative Distractions (RAD) initiative, the agency requests for feedback from sailors as well as Navy civilians on the way they can focus their daily activities on Warfighting First (Miller, 2014). Such effort have attained some success including the reduction of number of general military training (GMT), training topics as well as duplicative needs at the unit level for logging completed training into an online database. Through such measures, time can be saved and used in a wiser manner reducing the overstaffing problem. Another initiative by the Navy to address the problem is using “Adaptive Workforce” a working group sponsored by the Department’s Task Force Innovation. One of the key objectives of the task Force is assessment of innovation for the workforce, modernization of the hiring process of Navy employees as well as improvement of community management of the workforce. All these efforts have the potential of addressing the understaffing problem. Adaptive workforce initiative need to be able to attract, develop in addition to retaining World-class talent in the contemporary labour environment.
One strategy that has been successful in different industries in attracting and retaining competent employees and which the Navy can adopt is implementing the most appropriate level of pay. Brickley smith " Zimmerman (2016) uses the Basic Competitive model to explain how the level of pay works to attract new employees and retain the existing ones. The model assume the existence of two players in the market; producers and consumers. Producers compete against themselves through offering the desired products to the consumers at the lowest possible cost while consumers compete through paying prices of the products they have willingness of buying. The model assumes that the firm’s interest is maximizing of profit, consumers are rational or self-interested while markets are perfectly competitive. Hence, in the context of employment, consumers would make choices that meet their own self-interest, for instance they can choose working for other entities and not the navy and vice versa. Hence, the Navy should implement measures to attract these rational employees including paying higher wages than other industries.
Job dimension at the Navy
The Navy jobs are mainly organized around functional organizational structure which is among the most common organizational structure. In this form of structure, the employees are grouped in a specialized or similar set of roles or tasks (Ashkenas, et al. 2015). The organizational structure as organized in functional structure is presented in the figure 2. Below. The secretary of the Navy is the overall at the helm of leadership. Below the secretary is the Director of Programs Appraisal, General council, Chief of Legislative affairs, Chief of Information and Judge advocate general. The undersecretary of the Navy also reports directly to the Secretary of the Navy and gets direct reports from Naval Inspector general and director NCIS. Assistant secretaries for the various functions report to the Undersecretary of the Navy. Also under this line of reporting are Chief of Naval operations and the commandant of the Marine Corps.
Figure 2: Organizational Chart of the Navy department
The use of functional organizational structure as used by the Navy comes with a number of benefits. The grouping of people with similar knowledge and skills together making possible for them to become specialists in their own field. Further, this structure have a performance management system thus enabling the promotion, development as well as visibility of individual skills within the functional area. Another strength of the functional organizational job dimension is leading to operational efficiencies as well as fostering productivity levels. Due to the expertise, workers having specialized skills are able to perform tasks in amore quick, efficient and with increased confidence thus minimizing the occurrence of stress (Stresse, et al. 2016). Additionally, productivity is fostered by the clear nature of the career path within the functional unit.
However, this design has some weaknesses which can affect the performance of different employees at the Navy. Communication in the Navy for instance is rigid due to the standardized manners of operation in addition to the high degree of formalization. This has the potential of slowing the decision process and making it inflexible. As a result of bureaucracy, functional units are not accountable amongst themselves, with poor horizontal coordination within the departments occurring. Absence of innovation in addition to restricted views of organizational goals as well as too much focus have an impact on employees’ motivation. The recommendation to deal with this weaknesses is to borrow some aspects of matrix structure. However, caution should be taken to avoid loss of coordination.
Compensation package for the executive and employees
For the executives, the average salary on annual basis is estimated at between $86000 and $145,000. The executives are also entitled to cash bonus, stock bonus, profit sharing in addition to commission sharing. When all these are factored in, an executive officer at the Navy makes an average of $108,340 annually. For the other employee, the Navy offer numerous competitive financial benefits. Other non-financial benefits are offered including insurance, training and advancement, educational opportunities, and chance for travel throughout the world.
The compensation package for the executive and employees at the Navy is good but with the understaffing problem, the packages should be enhanced. This will enable the navy to get more qualified personnel to enroll.
References
Ashkenas, R., Ulrich, D., Jick, T., " Kerr, S. (2015). The boundaryless organization: Breaking the chains of organizational structure. John Wiley " Sons.
Brickley,J.A. Smith, C.W. and Zimmerman, J.L. (2016). Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture (6th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin.
GAO (2017). Navy Force Structure; Actions Needed to Ensure Proper Size and Composition of Ship Crews. Report to Congressional Committees
Miller, S. (2014, June 6). Navy launches second round of RAD campaign. Naval District Washington Public Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=81482. Also, NAVADMIN 117/14.
Murphy, M. S. (2010, May). Sea Warrior program (PEO-EIS PMW 240) overview[PowerPoint presentation]. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/NavySeaWarrior/sea-warrior-program-peoeis-pmw-240-command-brief-5055577
Strese, S., Meuer, M. W., Flatten, T. C., " Brettel, M. (2016). Organizational antecedents of cross-functional coopetition: The impact of leadership and organizational structure on cross-functional coopetition. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, 42-55.
