SUMMARY


All of these issues will come as no surprise but they continue to place pressure on the feeling of being valued and the morale of RAF personnel and their families. The principal reason still given for leaving the Service is the impact of Service life on the family, rather than the impact on the Service person themselves. Many officers, airmen and airwomen have told us that they relish all that Service life demands from them. However, when it constantly impacts adversely on children, spouses and partners and the work/life balance, it is often seen as stretching the moral contract that they feel exists between the Service and themselves. Increasingly, our subjective assessment would be that family morale is not as good as it is amongst serving RAF personnel: One RAF wife described herself to us as “feeling bruised by the system”, a description we think many other spouses and partners would recognise.


With so many People initiatives underway and the inherent substantial change to the RAF and military offer, together with the backdrop of increasing air power commitments across an increasingly unpredictable world, maintaining morale and the provision of effective support to RAF personnel and their families across the Whole Force has never been more important.


Our own assessment continues the themes we identified last year: At all levels of the Service, the uncertainty currently being experienced means that more RAF personnel and their families are thinking earlier and more seriously about their long term commitment to the Service. That does not mean they are all about to leave but it does show that our multi-generational Whole Force is less prepared to commit “for life” and will move on more readily than perhaps in the past, providing challenges for those charged with retaining the right people to provide the right capability. This behaviour could well reflect our wider society’s attitude to, and expectations of, careers and work/life balance but we note the responses to one of the questions in AFCAS 2016, where 93% of respondents felt they had met their commitment to the RAF over the year but only 44% felt the RAF had met its commitment to them.


wwww.raf-ff.org.uk ww.raf-ff.org.uk


7


Image: Part of the Red Arrows display tem flying over China. RAF Photographer. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28