Managing the Millennials - Thoughts on a Junior Sailors Letter...

Why are millennials leaving the navy? A simple question to which a poster on reddit, claiming to be a sailor has tried to answer in an open letter to the First Sea Lord.

In it the author addresses the reasons why they feel that people are leaving, and the challenges facing millennial recruits today. It is an interesting read, some of it cuts through and raises difficult questions, while other parts of it feel reliant on ‘anecdata’ not hard analysis of numbers.

People will always leave the military, many of them far earlier than planned. There are many thousands of sailors who have joined who leave early for extremely good reasons. Equally it is common to find military personnel moaning about life and their job – the ability to ‘have a good drip’ is the quintessential hallmark of being in the military – alongside good humour and a willingness to live an, at times, difficult lifestyle.

It is not unusual or unexpected then to see posts like this – there are plenty of military forums out there where serving personnel have raised concerns on different issues. The challenge though is determining what is a genuine issue, and what are things that are not accurate.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

For example the author claims that sailors and officers are ‘leaving the  mob in their thousands’. 

There is always outflow from the Navy as people leave – but it is important to distinguish between planned departures (e.g. retirement) and unplanned ones. A quick analysis of the historical RN outflow data suggests that this may not be completely accurate. For example the historical trend between 2012 and 2017 suggests that in many branches for both officers and ratings, ‘voluntary outflow’ (e.g. leaving before retirement) was overall on the decrease.

In 2017, for instance, 810 Ratings and 190 Officers left the Royal Navy under voluntary outflow, compared to almost 1200 and 230 in 2012. Year on year there was a downward trend in early departures from the Service. Contrary to the suggestions made, the data suggests that in fact retention is increasing relatively speaking compared to a few years ago. The perception at a local level may be that people are leaving, but this is not backed up for definite by statistics.

Similarly there is also the perception that the RN Rating cadre is being ‘seen off’ by accommodation improvements, with money being focused on Officers and Senior Rating accommodation instead. This is perhaps an example of where perceptions can vary from rank to rank.

For many years it was common to hear Officers complaining about the quality of their accommodation, for example the Wardroom Annex in HMS NELSON or the old overflow ‘Britannia Block’ in the Dockyard, and note that it wasn’t up to appropriate standards. At the same time they noted the significant cash being spent on Junior Rating accommodation to provide good quality rooms.

It was common for Junior Ratings to enjoy modern en-suite single rooms while Officers were stuck in decaying and often borderline condemned accommodation, where the closest thing to en-suite was the was hot and cold flushing sink.

The perception challenge may be that as the investment in accommodation rightly prioritised getting better JR accommodation built, that has now in some cases been in use for quite a long time and is getting older. It is only now though that other investments are being made for the rest of the Service, catching up to where the Juniors were a few years previously.

If you are a new joiner though, it is perhaps very easy to think that your slightly older, slightly scruffier block isn’t as good as the new build officer accommodation elsewhere. A big challenge for the RN has to be communicating effectively about the sheer scale of investment into accommodation in recent years, and how much has been spent on Junior Ratings.

One key complaint was about the way that trained ratings were often being used in inappropriate roles – for instance ‘stagging on’ in the main gate to check ID on entry. This is a good example of the challenges facing the modern Navy, which needs to recruit highly skilled, highly technical people to do vital work – but it also needs their junior staff to do some really dull jobs too.

If you’ve joined up to live a life ‘beyond limits’ or have an adventure, then getting to a remote naval establishment and standing on a gate at 0300 on a Saturday morning waiting to check a vehicle pass is not really what you joined for. But, if the wider system cannot find the staff to do this work, what slips – is it site security (and by extension in the worst case, putting at risk the lives of everyone on the site) or is it reallocating your workforce to guard the gate?

Workforce planners face difficult balancing acts- they need to try and meet very different drivers of need, while also retaining people for the long haul. The more people who leave early, the more pressure is put on the remaining junior staff. This is not conducive to retention – particularly when skilled people leave for a job in industry that can pay double the money and doesn’t require guarding or cleaning duties.

This is where the modern military offer is struggling to keep up with expectations. Modern millennials are not lazy, they are not snowflakes and they are not prone to throwing toys out of the pram. They are driven, motivated and want to do something with their lives – just like every single generation before them.

The big difference now though is that in an era of low unemployment, and skills shortages in many technical areas, modern millennials in trades like engineering, cyber security, intelligence analysis and other key skills are in huge demand by industry. If you train people and don’t make them feel valued and part of the system, or give them good reasons as to why their work matters, even when, by necessity, it is mundane or boring, then you run the risk of losing the people you need to keep.

The early loss of a junior rating can create a ripple in the system felt for decades to come – the so-called ‘black hole’ caused by switching off recruiting taps in the early 1990s at HMS RALEIGH has caused a dearth of people at every Rate for more than two decades now – planners today are living with the implications of decisions taken for good reasons nearly thirty years ago. In the same way the loss of too many good junior ratings now for the wrong reasons will be felt well into the 2040s and 50s.

There isn’t an easy fix to this problem – it is not just a case of saying ‘people moan’ and leaving it there. Its right that many sailors do moan, but there is often underlying issues which when addressed can reduce the frequency and predictability of these moans.

Maybe part of the underlying problem is that the military (and arguably wider society as a whole) is still trying to work out how best to reconcile their lifestyle, values and world with the expectations of the millennial and post millennial work force. While each generation finds the relationship with the following one to be strained at times (e.g. Baby Boomers and Generation X), this is perhaps a more pronounced change.

Unlike prior generations, the modern recruits have different social expectations, they place more emphasis on sport, less on drinking. Their socialising is often (but not always or exclusively) done online or through their phones. Growing up in a digitally connected world, their expectations on how to live life are different to others.

The military needs to recognise though that to keep itself fully manned, it must appeal credibly to these people and offer them something really special to recruit them and retain them. The British Army seems to have absolutely nailed it with their exceptional recruiting campaign (the so-called ‘snowflakes’) which has seen a real surge in applications from people keen to join.

Tapping into the psyche, mentality and drive of the younger generation is vital – they are the future Sgt Majors and Rear Admirals of 30-40 years time. Understanding that things need to be done differently is essential to ensuring they are still serving then.

The challenge for the military is trying to match up these two misaligned worlds, between the old school world and the modern millennial world, and ensuring that the offer, values and standards are in line with the talent pools expectations.

Looking ahead to the next 10-20 years and it is really interesting to think about how the armed forces will need to change to continue to recruit people. The offer is likely to need to change – will future recruits find the insistence on separating junior, senior and officers from each other for dining and 

accommodation purposes a necessity or nonsensical?

Will the existing Officer Mess world continue to be relevant if all it offers is a bland Travelodge accommodation experience for the future ‘band of brothers’ who weekly commute and want to skype their family, not spend time drinking in a barely average bar?

Similarly there are different expectations on promotion and recognition. The old systems of annual promotion by selection may have worked in the past – but in a world where open promotion on talent and merit is commonplace, and where individuals can push themselves forward and not have to rely on the word of their seniors on a promotion report to stand a chance of promotion, is the current system really fit for purpose? Has the time come to look at ways of doing business differently and let the individual own their career prospects?

Perhaps helping people take more positive control of their career, rather than relying on the annual disappointment of failing to be selected may be a retention positive move for a generation used to a more open way of doing business?

While it might be easy to dismiss much of this note from a junior sailor as being a misinformed rant (and to be fair when reading the section on the so-called ‘PC Brigade’ it was a poorly judged choice of words that felt distinctly at odds with the RN’s values and standards on this issue), it is still worth reading and considering what to do with it.

Modern Sailors are not weak, but they not unreasonably want a chance to enjoy the success and excitement of securing multiple drugs busts (like HMS ‘Puff the Magic’ DRAGON has done in the Gulf) or training in Norway in arctic warfare conditions (like the Royal Marines and Fleet Air Arm are doing right now) and not perhaps guarding the gate of a remote naval air station somewhere.

There doesn’t need to be a kneejerk reaction, but there does need to be some consideration about how to communicate why things happen, and more importantly how over time the system needs to evolve to recruit and retain people. Society changes at a speed that is far faster than the speed at which the Navy can change – trying to remain relevant is not always easy, but it is important to ensure that the next generation of talent feel valued and part of the system.