Can I Run This Place With No Employees?

Reply to the following:

I am a department career counsellor for a department of 392 enlisted personnel. It is my responsibility to track each of these individuals and to ensure that they are submitting career related paperwork correctly and in a timely fashion. Additionally, I am responsible for ensuring they receive their monthly career development boards and reporting monthly activity, as well as the status of their paperwork and such, to the command. I do not do this alone. I have 22 division career counsellors in 14 divisions that assist me. Each division career counsellor has 15-30 people in their purview that they track, conduct career development boards for, help them generate paperwork correctly, and then they report their activity to me. I consolidate their tracker inputs, verify their career development boards, verify the paperwork, and consolidate activity reports. If they are constantly absent, this increases my workload. Now, I am responsible for tracking and reporting the department as well as the individual divisions and their personnel. I have had instances where I was doing my job and filling in for 2-3 divisions. It was stressful, and thankfully temporary.

According to Dessler (2014), creating a training program requires a rational training process. (pg. 247) The model he suggests is ADDIE: analysis-design-develop-implement-evaluate. In my case, there is not really much I can do about absenteeism because I am not the direct supervisor of these Sailors. If I were their supervisor, my initial analysis reveals frequent absenteeism causing others to be overloaded with work. My design is simple - I would be getting across that frequent absenteeism is not acceptable and why. Development and implementation would also be simple. In the Navy, we have constant classroom, power point, and online training of varied topics. I prefer the direct method of talking to my Sailors in an open forum where I lay out the policy, open up to their comments, concerns, and questions, then follow up with an email to solidify what was discussed. Upon laying out the policy, violators will be given through written counselling. Three violations will show a pattern of misconduct that will lead to a development review board.

Dessler, G. (2013). Human Resource Management (13th edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.