The Defense Department faces a continuing challenge recruiting and retaining servicemembers across the U.S. military services.

Since 1980, the total number of active-duty military personnel has fallen by 37%, according to USAFacts data.

“It’s historic. The all-volunteer force has been working great for a very long time, but it’s with a shrinking pool of eligible candidates in the highly competitive talent market out there,” said Pamela Powers, executive managing director for the Defense market at Maximus.

Could DoD change that by reimagining how the department and the services interact with the roughly 2.1 million men and women who make up the country’s military force?

Not only is the answer yes, Powers said, but it’s essential so the military services can attract young recruits and also retain its trained warfighters.

“We live in 2024. In a day and age where we can access things in the private sector — in the commercial world — very easily, very efficiently. And our current generation of warfighters expect that,” she said. That’s what they grew up knowing. They are digitally minded. They see what good human-centered design is on a daily basis.”

If she sounds passionate about the topic, it’s because she is. Powers began her work life in the Air Force, serving more than 25 years. She then followed that up with leadership roles at the Pentagon and Veterans Affairs Department.

DoD “is going to quickly lose that new generation of talented folks if they don’t catch up,” she said told Federal News Network for our Forward-Thinking Government series.

Powers shared three elements that can help DoD and the services deliver better experiences to servicemembers to impact retention.

Retention Aid #1: Make digital transformation servicemember-centric

“It’s really important that they focus on taking care of the servicemembers and their families in the best way possible,” Power said. “And customer experience and employee experience approaches  can certainly help with that.”

For a long time, DoD and the services have focused on systems upgrades solely from the perspective of replacing and revamping the technology, she said. And “the services look at their employees as a whole,” rather than as individuals, added said.

Powers suggested that the department and the military services infuse their digital transformation initiatives with human-centered design techniques and define requirements based both on how servicemembers use the systems (as employees) and are impacted by them (as customers).

That starts with understanding the individual roles and journeys of servicemembers from before they arrive until after they complete their service.

“Really everything along the journey of a servicemember is a potential pain point or a potential area of opportunity to improve,” she said. To compete with the private sector, “the services need to make sure that they are taking care of their service members and their families in the right way across that entire journey.”

The inclusion of user and customer experience requirements in transformation initiatives is becoming more common, but it’s not pervasive, Powers said. She pointed to the Army Human Resources Command as an example of the move toward human-centered design within DoD.

“They’re one of the first HR organizations in the department that sees the value, and they’re shifting their transformation to be about the soldier and how they best serve that soldier and their families,” she said

Retention Aid #2: Integrate mission objectives with experience requirements

Employee experience efforts in digital transformation or business process improvement affects the mission, keeps servicemembers engaged and has the potential to ensure they continue their service, Powers said.

“What DoD really needs to be focused on is, ‘How can I design this system focused on the user, but best meet the mission requirements?’ ”

Employees want to be able to do their job well and have access to the technology and tools that helps them do that, she said. DoD and the services must compete with other agencies and with industry to both attract and retain personnel.

Designing for the person that’s going to use a system therefore is a must-do, Powers said.

“We’ve seen so many transformations over the years that were basically ‘lift-and-shift’ efforts fail because they didn’t understand what the problem was,” she said. “They didn’t understand how the systems were going to be accessed, and they didn’t understand how to help the mission in the end.”

Retention Aid #3: Align leadership, development and implementation teams

It’s also important that these efforts are enterprisewide and not siloed, Powers said. Culture change often becomes a critical factor in success. If leadership buys in and approves a project, but front- and mid-line users and managers are not prepared to make changes in workflow and processes, then the implementation will fail, she said.

“There has to be an alignment between the leadership, those that are implementing and those that are using the systems,” Powers said. “That’s a best practice that we’ve seen on the industry side.”

Success is possible, she said and encouraged DoD to look to Veterans Affairs for inspiration. As a designated high-impact service provider, VA has successfully put veterans at the center of its mission delivery initiatives, Powers said. Alignment within the organization, to focus everything they do on the veteran they serve, has been critical to their success.

“It’s made a huge difference. … In the 2015-2016 timeframe, trust by veterans in VA was in the high 50th percentile. Almost half of veterans didn’t trust the organization that they were getting services from and they were getting critical health care from. That was a big problem,” she said. “VA has made an investment since then and now, trust from veterans is up over 80%.”

Discover more about how to improve, secure and transform your federal operations in the Forward-Thinking Government series.

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