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GCN Home > January 24, 2000 issue

Web helps ease AF workload

Survey team uses forms tool for questionnaire to assess staff perceptions

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff


The Air Force Chief of Staff Survey asks personnel to give their geographic locations but does not collect personal identification.



By conducting its biennial personnel survey via the Web, the Air Force has cut the workload for information technology staffs at its bases worldwide.

A six-member team used a beta version of InterForm99, an application development tool from Raosoft Inc. of Seattle, to organize the 1999 Air Force Chief of Staff Survey, said Capt. Scott Hopkins, the survey team leader.

InterForm99’s wizard features build survey questions without the need for coding in Hypertext Markup Language, said Hopkins, who works at the Air Force Center for Quality and Management Innovation at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas.

A previous Chief of Staff Survey, created in 1997 from an amalgamation of prior assessments, went out to Air Force users via LAN and floppy disks, Hopkins said. The questionnaire software had to be loaded onto every server in the Air Force—and some bases have more than 100 servers.

No question

“The Web architecture drastically eliminated the need for the local people to place software on the servers,” Hopkins said.

The 1999 survey asked 121 questions, roughly half of which addressed the Air Force’s organizational climate and half the quality of life for employees.

The climate-related issues included supervision, leadership, recognition, flexibility, resources and job fulfillment, Hopkins said. The quality-of-life quiz asked about worker satisfaction with military housing, educational opportunities and other benefits.

Between Sept. 30 and Nov. 12, Hopkins said, everyone who works full time for the Air Force—both active-duty military and civilian personnel—could fill out the questionnaire. Nearly 190,000, or 35 percent to 40 percent of those eligible, responded to the 1999 survey, Hopkins said.

The survey site, at csafsurvey.randolph.af.mil, first asked each participant to make up a unique user identification and password. That way, respondents could take a break and come back to the questionnaire later.

Next, the survey showed a world map where respondents could click on their duty locations. Within the United States, they could drill down to states, locations within states and names of service organizations. The Air Force team had the option of creating office symbols for organizations with more than 120 employees.

The survey randomly rotated the main portions of the quiz so that some respondents answered the organizational-climate questions first and others the quality-of-life questions first. That increased the statistical reliability of the data by reducing respondents’ potential fatigue, Hopkins said.



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