Talk Therapy

wnbubbleboy

Veteran
Aug 21, 2002
944
22
By God Indiana
DALLAS -- At 9 on a Thursday morning, a dozen people cram into an airline conference room to tally the damage from the previous day's extreme weather: thunderstorms in the East, heat in the West.

The results were ugly: 17 flights delayed more than four hours, four jets diverted to other airports, five planes still in the air at 5:30 that morning. On top of that, the software that was supposed to help the carrier schedule its flight crews went down for two hours. Several people groan.

Southwest Airlines holds two such meetings daily at its headquarters. They're aimed at not only assessing what went wrong but figuring out what can done to make things better, a reason why the carrier receives high customer-service and on-time performance marks, executives say. It's also part of Southwest's push for a more open culture.

Most airlines tend to have top-down, military-like cultures. As a result, the people closest at hand when things go amiss -- customer service agents, baggage handlers, ramp workers -- often aren't encouraged to report problems. In fact, they fear being punished for doing so.

At Southwest, front-line troops are prodded to report service problems immediately so things can be fixed and customers kept in the loop. As delays and cancellations worsen across the industry, Southwest has drafted new ways to get everybody working in concert when weather, air-traffic control or freak events disrupt its schedule.

Even so, it has taken a while to get people to adapt. Take the twice-daily meetings, internally called MOM and DAD, acronyms for Morning Overview Meeting and Daily Afternoon Discussion.

Although the sessions have been in effect since 2000, it took most participants a long time to feel comfortable owning up to mishaps, said Fred Taylor, senior manager for proactive customer service communications and the executive team's eyes and ears at the meetings.

"They were very guarded in what they would discuss," said Taylor, who began attending in 2001 at the behest of Southwest President Colleen Barrett. "They saw it as I'm prying, and I could cause their department to be reprimanded. Slowly, I built up their trust."



http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi...hi-business-hed
 
DALLAS -- At 9 on a Thursday morning, a dozen people cram into an airline conference room to tally the damage from the previous day's extreme weather: thunderstorms in the East, heat in the West.

The results were ugly: 17 flights delayed more than four hours, four jets diverted to other airports, five planes still in the air at 5:30 that morning. On top of that, the software that was supposed to help the carrier schedule its flight crews went down for two hours. Several people groan.

Southwest Airlines holds two such meetings daily at its headquarters. They're aimed at not only assessing what went wrong but figuring out what can done to make things better, a reason why the carrier receives high customer-service and on-time performance marks, executives say. It's also part of Southwest's push for a more open culture.

Most airlines tend to have top-down, military-like cultures. As a result, the people closest at hand when things go amiss -- customer service agents, baggage handlers, ramp workers -- often aren't encouraged to report problems. In fact, they fear being punished for doing so.

At Southwest, front-line troops are prodded to report service problems immediately so things can be fixed and customers kept in the loop. As delays and cancellations worsen across the industry, Southwest has drafted new ways to get everybody working in concert when weather, air-traffic control or freak events disrupt its schedule.

Even so, it has taken a while to get people to adapt. Take the twice-daily meetings, internally called MOM and DAD, acronyms for Morning Overview Meeting and Daily Afternoon Discussion.

Although the sessions have been in effect since 2000, it took most participants a long time to feel comfortable owning up to mishaps, said Fred Taylor, senior manager for proactive customer service communications and the executive team's eyes and ears at the meetings.

"They were very guarded in what they would discuss," said Taylor, who began attending in 2001 at the behest of Southwest President Colleen Barrett. "They saw it as I'm prying, and I could cause their department to be reprimanded. Slowly, I built up their trust."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi...hi-business-hed

I'm all for more of this!