AFSC Goals Series No. 2: Caring for people Published June 10, 2013 By Brandice J. O'Brien Tinker Public Affairs TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- Air Force Sustainment Center senior leadership considers its people a most important asset and has expressed its commitment to caring for its personnel. In fact, they created a strategic plan goal for the 32,000-person geographically-separated workforce. It is: "Enable an adaptable, resilient, professional and highly-skilled workforce and care for our people." The goal is one of five the center is striving to achieve to become more integrated, innovative and efficient center for the future. With the goal are four objectives: "(Gain and) maintain workforce engagement greater than 80 percent," "All wings to ensure that there are sufficient leadership trained personnel to meet projected leadership vacancies," "Achieve Voluntary Protection Program 'Star' status criteria across the AFSC by Oct. 1, 2017," and "Standardize all AFSC wings' functional training and certification plans by Jan. 31, 2015." "People are clearly a very important component of the Department of Defense and the AFSC," United Kingdom royal air force Wing Commander Jonathan Durke at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Assigned to the Logistics Directorate, he is working with the strategic planning team on the development, maturation and socialization of the AFSC Goals and Objectives. When brainstorming the goal about people, AFSC senior leadership discussed the need for the military and civilian workforce to be adaptable and resilient given the challenges the DOD and specifically the AFSC faces, as well as the need to ensure that people are trained to the appropriate levels and they, and their families are cared for. Following the offsite, the strategy planning team took on the challenge to determine how to ensure achievement of this goal and set meaningful and measurable objectives. The objective relating to workforce engagement set the biggest challenge across the AFSC. Seven areas were considered important to measure and manage are 1) levels of training, 2) professional development opportunities, 3) leadership, 4) tools to complete the job, 5) safe working environment, 6) support mechanisms in place and welfare capabilities and 7) the workforce adaptability and engagement with change and transformation. "The leadership team is taken with a number of other areas, firstly how we train our leadership and are we training them to be good leaders," said Commander Durke. "Rather than have a leadership vacancy and no on trained and losing time, efficiency and affecting the mission we need to get personnel leadership trained so when vacancies arise we have sufficient resource." The functional training and certification objective is an additional piece to the goal. The objective is about standardizing the training plans predominantly for supply chain and maintenance personnel, which are the largest pieces to the center. Workforce engagement and the two training objectives are co-led by the AFSC Personnel Directorate and AFSC Logistics Group. Safety and the culture of creating a secure work environment are also very important to the AFSC. "We already measure incident rates but there is now a requirement for a more widespread change to meet a commercial safety standard," the commander said. "We want more of a cultural change and a campaign across the entire organization, and make sure it's recognized by the accredited safety organization, Occupational Safety and Health Administration with its 'Star' status." Overseen by Brig. Gen. Cedric George, commander of the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex, Ga., the safety objective has a four-year deadline to ensure the center's units fulfills their responsibilities and allows enough time for OSHA to complete its ongoing and reassessment evaluations. "Every area of AFSC focuses on these issues, but the way we measure efforts at different locations varies," said Janet Johnson, AFSC Logistics Strategic Planning Branch chief and lead at Tinker. "The goal is to standardize. The data exists, but the enterprise-wide view is where the objectives are focused."