Sailors and Marines stand at parade rest on the flight deck of the USS Bataan amphibious assault ship as it pulls into the port of Miami for Fleet Week in May 2024. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
WASHINGTON — The Navy is asking sailors to answer questions about their quality of life and work to help improve retention in the service.
Accessible online, the annual “Health of the Force” survey is open until June 30 and takes about 20 minutes to complete. Participation in the survey is voluntary and confidential.
The purpose of the survey is to gather sailor feedback on their careers and experiences in the Navy.
This year, the survey includes questions regarding trust in leaders, professional development and job satisfaction. The answers provided by sailors will be used to “shape the future of our Navy,” the service said.
“Leaders can’t change what they don’t know about,” the Navy said of the annual survey in 2024.
Quality-of-life issues have become a priority for the services in recent years amid recruiting and retention struggles.
The Navy began working in 2023 to improve quality of life for sailors following a 7,000-sailor recruitment shortfall and investigations into suicides of Virginia-based sailors. The Navy met its recruiting goal in 2024 and exceeded retention forecasts among those who have been in the service for less than 14 years. But defense analysts have said the service might see a dip in retention due to sailor burnout as a result of extended deployments and lengthy maintenance periods for ships.
Recent quality-of-life changes include installing Wi-Fi in barracks and expanding on-base gym access to 24-hours a day, seven days per week. The gym access was expanded based on results of a previous Health of the Force survey, the Navy said.
The survey is open to all sailors.
To take the survey, sailors will need to enter their Defense Department identification number. Doing so verifies they are a service member and allows the Navy to plug in demographic data without asking the member to input that information. The survey is confidential, and answers are not linked to the sailors’ identification numbers. Leaders will not receive information on who took the survey or what their responses were, the Navy said.
