Your bonuses are about to get personal.
Want that coveted instructor job in Mayport? Or three weeks of schoolhouse training for a hard-to-get NEC course?
The Navy’s used bonus bucks to influence sailors for two centuries, like the bounties in the days of sail for those who enlisted or re-upped. For as long as U.S. Navy has existed, they’ve paid bonuses to influence behavior. In the days of sail, bounties were paid to sailors if they agreed to sign up or re-up in the service.
The Navy may soon offer corporate-style bonuses that package together targeted bonus amounts with plum assignments or hard-to-get training., but it could become more personal in the next few years, if Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus gets his way and Congress goes along with the plan.
He wants the Navy to change the the current bonus system and make it more flexible. This year, they’re asking congress to re-write the laws that govern such bonuses, asking for more flexibility in how they dole out incentives to service members.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus wants to change the bonus system radically In the future, he want to change the system radically and offer more incentives beyond than just money, by as because focus groups with fleet sailors have told Navy leadership that it’s not always about the money, but could include other dangling carrots such as guaranteed duty location and advanced training schools.
“We’re asking Congress to amend our current broad-based bonus system to make it look more like those used in the private sector,” Mabus told Naval Academy midshipmen May 13.
“By granting department leaders the flexibility to match pay incentives with individual skill sets and talent levels, we can better compensate and retain officers and enlisted.”
For most of the past half century, the service has given out those bonuses in what personnel officials now call a “one-size-fits-all” system that doesn’t take into account the total individual, only the individual’s job codes and skills — and sometimes pay grade and years of service.
Under the current system, that Mabus described as “broad-based,” the Navy simply uses money, and only money, to influence sailors to stay in the service. sign up instead of taking their skills and walking into the private sector.
Bonus overhaul
While retention is good, officials are wary of an improving economy that will soon be enticing sailors into the private sector at much higher rates. In offering bonuses as a retention enticement, officials currently take into account the need for experienced and top-notch people in the most critical service’s skills and weighs that against the Navy’s ability to retrain new sailors off the street.
But some skills you can’t find on the street. They can only be acquired through longevity and experiencein the service.
Officers, for example, are offered retention if their initial service obligation has or is about to pass to keep them in the ranks for department head and command billets.
On the enlisted side, there’s the Selective Reenlistment Bonus for those with up to 14 years of service and Enlisted Supervisor Retention Pay to keep those with critical skills in the ranks.
And after a time during theis latest decade long drawdown when it was even, for a time, eliminated altogether — officials are expanding the program on the enlisted side and plan to spend more money over the next couple years
Currently the Navy pays re-up bonus The Navy pays out bonuses at five different maximum levels, depending on the Navy’s need for a given skill: $30,000, $45,000, $60,000, $75,000 and $100,000.
For fiscal 2015, the Navy has a budget of $135 million for initial re-up bonus payments, and officials are hoping to entice 8,500 sailors to stay in the ranks.
Next fiscal year, the Navy is asking for a $19.4 million increase for fiscal 2016, for a total re-up budget of $154.4 million.
What a sailor can get is based on a formula with that at the heart that calculation is a “multiple” the Navy attaches to their existing rating or sometime Navy Enlisted Classification. That multiple is then factored with their basic pay and the number of months they’re re-enlisting for, up to the payout max their skill qualifies for.
But The trend now isn’t toward bigger bonuses, but to find ways to spreading money to more sailors. what dollars they have to more individuals.BMabus’ desire to move towards a private-sector like system more like the private sector has been often discussed in the past decade, but until recently there’s been no official movein that direction until recently.
Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Bill Moran said in April that he’d like to offer more targeted bonuses and to be able to tweak bonuses on even a more targeted basis and be able to constantly tweak payout levels in real time, instead of relying on annual updates the service is offering now.
The overhaul would go beyond that to eventually tailor bonus packages In fact, what Mabus, Moran and the Navy’s leadership wants is a new system that may not offer multiples to just ratings or NEC’s — but make them personal to the individual sailor’s skills — and what they get from that multiple to better meet the sailor’s personal and family needs.
Such a system would take a wouldn’t just look at the basic skills, but to much deeper look at sailors’ value, individual worth to the Navy, taking into account all their training and even civilian education.
In the end, this new multiple could be used by the Navy to put a monetary value on each sailor’s retention in the service.
This value could be used by the sailor to negotiate a package of incentives that might include taking less than the full value in cash and opting instead to bargain for choice orders or a career-enhancing school as well.
“We regularly hear from our folks that flat rate bonuses by themselves are less and less of a reason for high-quality sailors to stay Navy,” Moran said in April. “To ensure we keep the right people with the right skills, we need to continue to improve and refine the SRB process.”
But creating the ability to dig deeply into a sailor’s complete service record and then build metrics for each sailor’s value will likely take years of work. get to the ability of producing a metric of individual sailor value could take some time to accomplish.
In addition to convincing lawmakers to loosen rules on bonuses, leaders will need to upgrade and consolidate human resource databases and systems, a daunting project. Neither Mabus in his speech or Moran have given a time table for such reform, but see both Congress’ loosening of existing legal rules on bonuses and getting the money and ability to upgrade and consolidate their human resource and training computer systems is critical to any steps forward.
For now, Moran plans to move forward in incremental steps, like the such as in baby steps which include a move to twice-yearly SRB updates in the next year or two.
“Key to this is upgrading our old and outdated personnel system, cleaning up data and improving access across all of our IT systems,” he said. “Better information in the hands of sailors, COs and detailers will improve this and many other ‘people’ processes across our Navy.”
