Introduction

Working on a submarine is incomparable to any other job in society. Normal deployment schedule is an 18-month cycle, but with the COVID-19 outbreak and other unforeseeable events, the crew of the USS Key West has dealt with even more adversity than the standard submariner. With these additional hardships comes overloaded work schedules, exhaustion, and mental stress. This proposal outlines an organizational development intervention for the crew of the USS Key West to redesign their work to alleviate mental and physical health impairments. An implementation plan will be discussed including defined expectations, communication methods, timelines, possible training, change resistance, and evaluation. The intervention's goal is to create a more streamlined operation that allows for the crew to have some semblance of a normal schedule that will make life on the submarine easier to manage.

Organization Description

USS Key West (SSN 722) is a Los Angeles-Class submarine and the third ship named after Key West, Florida. Her keel was laid on 6 July 1983, launched on 20 July 1985, and commissioned on 12 September 1987. Until January of 2023, the "War Conch" and her crew were forward deployed to Guam as a quick-strike, Pacific asset. Most recently, she has shifted homeport to Bremerton, Washington, for inactivation and transfer into the Navy's fleet reserve. The ship's suggested personnel asset complement consists of 150 Sailors, consisting of about 20 Officers and 130 enlisted men. Her weapons armament boasts a classified combination of Mark-48 torpedoes and Tomahawk missiles fired from four forward facing torpedo tubes and 12 vertical launch cell assemblies, respectively.

The command employment over the past two years has constituted an extreme operational tempo, when compared to the normal rigors associated with a normal eighteen-month deployment cycle. Key West deployed to the Western Pacific and remained there from June of 2021 until December of the same year, was allotted zero liberty ports and was not allowed to leave the pier during two working ports due to COVID-19. She was awarded the Battle 'E' award for Submarine Squadron Fifteen for excellent work in theatre. With knowledge of the impending inactivation, the ship underwent a customary 30-day standdown following their return and immediately launched into preparations and subsequent certifications for a mid-summer deployment. The additional tasking taxed the crew for an additional 90 days (about 3 months) of at-sea operation for pre-deployment proficiency. KEY WEST departed Guam for deployment in early July of 2022 and was scheduled for return in late October. Due to the end of the ship's life and anticipated lowered future work capacity, KEY WEST was extended by an entire month and assigned to the toughest operational area in the Western Pacific. She returned to Guam the week before Thanksgiving and was not allotted the customary standdown period. Instead, her crew lost the anticipated leave period and was ordered to pack up their homes and families and change homeport to Bremerton, Washington in less than thirty days. Additionally, her crew was stripped of the Weapons Officer, Supply Officer, Executive Officer, Maintenance Coordinator, and approximately 15 critical enlisted billets for allocation to other forward-deployed assets.

Upon arrival for inactivation in Bremerton, KEY was immediately ordered to scrap plans for inactivation and entered an arduous upkeep availability to ready for an emergency deployment laced with critical weapons testing and international joint exercises. Due to the recent reassignment of Sailors, KEY's parent command gathered a group of reinforcements from local, shipyard boats and directed that the "War Conch" train and certify a patchwork team. Once again, the ship was extended for over a month and returned from the urgent at-sea period after five months of unplanned sea time. The retro-fill Sailors were immediately returned to their billeted commands.

Due to an anticipated inactivation date of January 2024, KEY WEST stopped receiving billeted assets in September of 2022. An unforeseen submarine accident involving USS Connecticut and unresolved seismic activity in the Pacific Northwest (rendering the drydock facilities necessary for submarine decommissioning unsafe) had forced the hand of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and elongated maintenance and inactivation schedules by years instead of months. As of this writing, the anticipated crew release projects to October 2025.

Overview of the Problem

The KEY WEST crew is exhausted, taxed beyond the scope of the normal "unusually arduous" monicker used by the Navy to describe a submarine sea tour. The absence of both an end point in sight and a tenable force of personnel supplementation has obligated the command's force extension of all personnel onboard by one year. Subsequently, further mentions of the schedule appendage have resulted in an additional service obligation onboard the ship, totaling sixteen months. As they have honorably answered the call up to this point, an overwhelming percentage of the crew (~90%) voluntarily extended their release from the ship.

Additionally, KEY WEST is chronically undermanned at less than 65 percent of her prescribed detail. The impact at the deck-plate level is distributed reasonably across each division but has taken a larger toll on the Officer cluster. At the onset of the unanticipated sea tour and inactivation timeline extension, KEY set-in motion the wheels for the detailing of additional Sailors. The major problem associated with the approximately 18 months of zero Sailors gained to the ship, though, is that one full year of qualification is required to bring a prospective employee to a competent state. Therefore, the ship sits at just under 65 percent of the manning requirement, but her qualification status of that 65 percent brings the useful number of Sailors to a number closer to 50 percent.

The average Sailor works five days a week (Monday through Friday) when assigned to a normal, sea-going command. That is an eight-hour workday (8am to 5pm) with occasional shiftwork accompanying periods of heavy workload. This work schedule, if examined in a bubble, appears completely manageable. Each Sailor, however, is also attached to a duty section. The absolute best rotation available for the crew consists of an equal division of four sections, which means that each Sailor would have duty assignment (a 24-hour workday, during which the Sailor is permanently assigned to the ship and fulfills their watch obligations) every fourth day. KEY's current predicament places most of the crew in a state requiring three section duty, meaning that each Sailor is attached to the ship, as described, every third day. It is critical that the reader understands that this is in addition to their five-day workweek and excuses them from no other obligations. Bringing further clarity, the Sailors that are assigned duty on the weekends lose that day off for the week under the current construct. This means no Sailor attached to KEY would have a traditional weekend (off on Friday afternoon and return to work on Monday) for their tour (~4 years) and would receive two days off in a week only every third week. (ATTACH CHARTS FOR WORKDAYS IN 3 and 4 SECTION)

Recently, meetings were arranged with the captain named Calls of the Captain. All departments of the submarine met privately with the captain of the submarine to be able to air their grievances. While the crew is wanting to fulfill their duty, it is hard to ignore the exhaustion that comes along with the current schedule. The top concern of most of the crew is fatigue. Fatigue is not a singular issue. It has influences directly on many people's physical and mental abilities needed to carry out even a simple task. The most important effects of fatigue including decreased task motivation, longer reaction time, reduction of alertness, impaired concentration, poorer psychometric coordination, problems in memory and information processing, and poor judgement (Yazdi & Sadeghniiat-Haghighi, 2015). All crew only getting a two-day weekend roughly once a week for four years qualifies as a fatiguing schedule. Fatigue can impair workplace performance in four key areas: alertness, emotional stability, mental ability, and physical ability (Sawatzky, 2017). Research suggests that those who work more than 64 hours per week face 88% excess risk (Vegso, Cantley, Slade, et al., 2007). Even working more than 50 hours per week increases the risk of making an error by almost two times (Rogers, Hwang, Scott, et al., 2004). Safety is of utmost importance on a submarine where one false decision can affect the other crew as well as potentially civilians.

Planned Interventions

There are very specific assignments that the submarine crew have to complete, and these cannot just be stopped so everyone can leave for the day at 5 pm. The whole structure of the submarine schedule, tasks, and personnel need to be analyzed and reviewed. The proposed interventions need to be techno-structural interventions to understand the workflow of the submarine as well as the work assignments. Techno-structural interventions aim to better align an organization's structure, technology, and processes with its goals and objectives (Smart, 2024).

The first and most paramount intervention to be implemented is a four-day workweek. The four-day workweek model has the worker only working four, eight-hour days while all pay remains the same. All normal work activities are expected to be completed within this timeframe. Several industries have started experimenting with this schedule and are seeing improved productivity, morale and team culture, whereas individuals are reaping benefits for their health, finances and relationships (Liu, 2023). While the four-day workweek model will need to be modified to fit the submarine schedules that require 24-hour coverage, it will still allow for less working hours overall than the current schedule. In this construct, everybody gets two days off every week and two out of three weeks have consecutive days off. By having more off time, the crew will reduce fatigue. Even with less time, they should be just as, if not potentially more, productive. One study suggests that the effects of fatigue result in nearly 2.5 hours of lost productivity each week per employee (Ricci, Chee & Lorandeau, 2007).

As part of the four-day workweek intervention, there should be an intervention to examine all tasks and meetings to see where efficiencies can be discovered. The biggest loss of time organizations see is in meetings. All meetings should be reviewed, and the necessity assessed. Can any of these meetings be eliminated, shortened, or combined with other meetings? Are there any repetitions that can be removed? As an example, there are currently meetings called Morning Quarters. This is a pre-work huddle before the morning work begins. By using this meeting to outline the most important tasks of the day, the crew knows where their focus needs to be to get all work done in less time. Onboard processes should also be reviewed. What job tasks can other sections do that they were not doing before? By reducing it to a four-day workweek, all processes need to be examined to allow for all jobs to be completed. Not only will this assist with worker fatigue, but this will lend itself to job enrichment for the crew. Also, while the personnel are being reviewed there should be a review to see if any tasks can be automated or streamlined with the advent of technology not currently being used. There could already be something available that is not being utilized.

answer the following questions about this topic

Planning Phase

Set clear guidelines

What is the goal of this program?

There may be times when this schedule won't work?

What additional training needs to be done for this to work?

Resistance to Change Discussion

What will the feedback be?

Will there be any groups that will be against it?

How can any negative feedback be mitigated?