Personnel
Personnel Command Update – Trends and Observations
Good afternoon everyone,
Unlike operations command and training command the work of personnel command is often less obvious but no less important. This update aims to give you a bit of a look behind the curtain and some information on what you can do to help us improve! For this announcement I will primarily be focusing on the work of J2 as it applies to regulars but if this style of update is of interest am happy to revisit a J1 focused update in the future.
Why does it matter?
The work of PC ultimately matters so that we can all have fun playing together within a group where everyone has a different background, experience and expectation. At time of writing UNITAF represents 31 countries who will understandably communicate differently. A lot of the work of PC is facilitating respectful communication and ensuring that all members are able to fit into UNITAFs culture. To quote the code of conduct we are one team with one goal and that is ultimately what PC tries to maintain. In order to do that we have a few tools at our disposal, outlined in more detail below:
Observations
What are observations and how are they used?
Observations are information you want recorded about someone else. This generally falls into one of 4 categories:
- Informative
- Positive
- Negative
- Policy Violation
These should contain all the information required to review the observation but that doesn’t mean it has to be an essay. Some of the nicest observations to accept are along the lines of ‘super chill, loved being in their team, always on it with checking on buddy’.
Unfortunately, a lot of the time it is the later two categories which are used but one of the things you can do to help us is use positive more! If someone was helpful on an OP or answering questions in discord, please tell us!
We use observations to establish trends on members dossiers, positive or negative, in order to identify the difference between someone having an off day and a trend of behaviour that needs intervention. We would really like to encourage positive observations so we can make sure we can give out praise reports as much as possible (see reports stats below).
How can I write an observation?
Observations may be added either via the AAR screen for those in your callsign after a mission or directly via a member’s dossier. Everyone can write observations on anyone else – this is not just for CoC!
What are recent observation trends?
*note chart excludes other rare or legacy observation types such as informative, warning, selection boards etc.
- Positive observations have risen in recent months — now 33.85% vs 28.30% all time.
- Informative observations remain the most common but have decreased proportionally from 45.08% to 40.31% in the last 6 months.
- Negative observations have increased from 10.80% all-time to 14.46% in the last 6 months.
- Policy Violations are proportionally higher in recent months (9.85%) compared to all-time (3.63%).
- Personnel Command has accepted an average of 1.8 observations a day, in the last 6 months. Down slightly from 2.13 a day since March 2024.
Reports
What are reports and how are they used?
- Reports are used by PC to *do something* - this typically breaks down to 3 categories: personnel action requests (PARs), reprimands and praises.
- While the last two are hopefully self-explanatory a PAR is used to do anything else, that can be to issue a medal, action a promotion, look at a flagged AAR etc.
- Reports may only be generated automatically or by a member of PC staff. But if for instance you think you are owed a medal please do let us know and we will happily sort that out for you!
What are recent report trends?
- Personnel Action Requests dominate both all-time and recent data, increasing slightly from 74.77% to 78.41% in the last 6 months.
- Reprimands have risen from 16.95% all-time to 20.83% in the last 6 months.
- Praise is significantly lower in recent months — just 0.76% compared to 8.29% all-time.
- We need to do better at identifying positive influences and generating praise reports for them
- Personnel command has resolved an average of 1.46 reports a day over the last 6 months
Summary and how you can help
While its often less obvious PC is working, we process an average of 1.8 observations and 1.46 reports a day now. But historically it has often been a good thing to not know that we are working as most interactions have been reprimands.
I would like to change this – so please, send us observations! Particularly positive observations that we can then praise people for! I would also very much welcome feedback on how we can praise better for good conduct, ideas are very welcome.
Hopefully this has been an interesting insight into PC and I think is the largest amount of data we have ever released publicly on how much we do and what it tends to consist of. Please let us know if this has been useful!
First Lieutenant Aiedail
Personnel Officer
UNITAF
