Squadron orderly rooms shutting down

[unhappycamper]

Closing their doors
Personnelist drawdown spurs change.


Squadron orderly rooms shutting down
By Bruce Rolfsen - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Jan 22, 2008 14:47:12 EST

For many years, the orderly room — home to the commander’s support staff — has been the go-to place for resolving personnel and promotion issues at the squadron level. But with the number of personnel specialists declining by about 40 percent through 2012 compared with 2006 manpower levels, there will not be enough to fill positions in every squadron.

The Air Force started 2006 with 10,635 personnelists and aims to be down to about 8,300 by the end of 2008. By the end of 2012, their numbers will decline further to about 6,420.

As part of a servicewide reorganization of personnel functions, squadron-level personnelists will be merged into a single base-level office that is part of the base’s military personnel flight, said Maj. Chris Busque, chief of career field integration in the Air Staff’s personnel directorate. The goal is to have the merged offices in place at every base by the end of fiscal 2008 Busque said. Several installations have made the change, including Grand Forks Air Force Base, Neb., Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., and Incirlik Air Base, Turkey. The merger is also part of a wider effort to conduct more day-to-day personnel business on the Internet, letting airmen fill out and turn in forms using computers, and to have routine decisions made at a single Air Force office instead of at base offices. Now, squadron commanders everywhere are able to view personnel information online instead of asking an orderly to pull paperwork from a filing cabinet, Busque said. The new computer program for unit leaders, called the squadron commander’s dashboard, debuted in late 2007. But squadrons are still responsible for a wide range of tasks that had been done by the support staff. Those duties include handling off-duty employment requests, civilian time cards and commanders calls, initiating awards and decorations, maintaining personnel information files held by the squadron commanders, assigning raters and making sure evaluations are completed on time.

Even before the personnel career field began to shrink, it was tough to staff each squadron with a personnel specialist, Busque said. Deployments meant a unit could go months without its assigned personnelists, and if an airman took leave, someone else had to fill in. The idea of moving squadron-level personnelists took shape in 2006 as bases began to see staffing levels fall. For Grand Forks, the drawdown called for only 13 specialists to fill 19 support staff positions by the end of 2008, recalled Maj. Sarah Schultz, who oversees the base personnel office as commander of the 319th Force Support Squadron. One of her personnel officers, Capt. Jamison Braun, suggested the wing merge the remaining squadron personnelists into the wing’s military personnel flight, Schultz said. Braun had seen a similar system work while assigned to the joint U.S. European Command. They followed his plan, and in 2007, the Grand Forks program became the model for Air Force-wide changes, Schultz said.


Rest of article at: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/01/airforce_orderly_080122/