Tuesday, April 24, 2001

By Lisa Burgess, Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — The Army’s new plan to integrate all of its quality-of-life initiatives under a single umbrella is receiving unprecedented cooperation among top service leaders, Army officials said.

Brig. Gen. William Heilman, director of the Human Resources Directorate in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, said that collecting all the Army’s quality-of-life programs under a single program and establishing goals, strategies and objectives for each element, along with using metrics to measure success, has never been done before.

"Most, or at least a lot, of the quality-of-life programs are in place," Heilman said, explaining the well-being program during a conference last week of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, held in Vienna, Va.

But the Army had "fallen into the human resources trap" of allowing all the individual programs to be administered as stand-alone entities, Heilman said. With no coordination from the top, the Army found it difficult, if not impossible, to figure out exactly how program changes affected their target audiences, he said.

Moreover, without hard-and-fast statistics to back them up, the Army’s leaders had trouble convincing the secretary of defense and Congress to allocate more funds for quality-of-life improvements, such as better housing or more child care, Heilman said.

The program is the brainchild of the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., where, in 1999, students were asked to develop a detailed definition to answer the question: what is well-being?

The answer, the students decided, falls into a framework encompassing four specific human goals: to serve, to live, to connect and to grow.

To serve: With "to serve" acting as the underpinning goal — the one goal that all soldiers have in common — the Army then linked each of the its well-being initiatives to one of the other three goals.

To live: Providing a competitive standard of living for all soldiers and their families falls under the "to live" goal. All housing, health care, pay and professional education initiatives are in this category.

To connect: "To connect" involves providing a unique culture and sense of community that gives soldiers pride and a sense of belonging. The Army’s morale, welfare and recreation programs, which support individual hobbies and interests, are in this category.

To grow: "To grow" entails finding ways for soldiers to enrich their personal lives. Religious and family programs, as well as personal education, predominate in this category.

The Army program is more than just lofty-sounding definitions, however.

The idea behind the detailed planning scheme is to ensure that funding requests for quality-of-life programs are part of the Army’s yearly planning process, instead of afterthoughts, Heilman said. To do this, each quality-of-life program has been assigned a series of goals that are linked in turn to the Army’s long-term operations and management-funding timetable.

For example, the Army’s plans now call for soldiers living in all U.S.-based barracks to have private rooms and a semiprivate bathroom by fiscal year 2008.

With overall plans for the program agreed upon, the next step for Heilman is to staff a separate division in the Human Resources Directorate with 12 to 14 people whose job is to focus specifically on implementing program initiatives.

That staff should be in place by the end of summer, Heilman said.

Beginning next year, program plans call for Heilman to meet three times each year with the Army’s General Officer Steering Committee — the top 30 Army chiefs — to discuss progress with the quality-of-life initiative. The vice chief of the Army will sit in on two of those meetings, Heilman said.

So far, to Heilman’s surprise, Army leaders’ reactions to the new program have been "enormously positive."

"It’s hard to get 30 generals in a room and get them all enthusiastic about the same thing," Heilman said.

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