Linda Rutherford is chief administration & communications officer for Southwest Airways.
Studying from failure is without doubt one of the best classes in life. A few of the best comebacks in historical past are rooted in taking a tough look within the mirror, taking accountability, and doing what’s required to not repeat your failures of the previous. When you find yourself a for-profit enterprise, you’ve gotten guidelines, insurance policies and processes for security, reliability and accountability.
Because the chief administration & communications officer for Southwest Airways, a part of my obligations embody nurturing the corporate’s fame and guiding disaster response efforts when one thing goes incorrect. The final week of December 2022, our operation did not get almost 2 million vacationers to their supposed vacation spot. This disruption was unprecedented, not solely in my 31-year profession at Southwest, however in our historical past as an airline.
What went incorrect
What started as a widespread winter storm shortly became a large operational disruption for Southwest, and our lack of means to get well was an outlier within the business. The climate was worse than predicted, and our advance planning for winter operations at a number of of our areas shortly grew to become unviable. Our bigger areas (together with Denver and Chicago), together with different cities throughout our community, have been experiencing varied points popping out of the intense climate, with every thing from deicing capabilities to passenger jet bridges that have been deemed inoperable when hydraulics had frozen within the harsh circumstances. The end result of those points led to large-scale, close-in cancellations that degraded the general operation.
It was not one factor that led to our state of affairs; as an alternative, our ongoing inner overview has proven it was a collection of occasions that we’ll must proceed to interrupt down and analyze. Along with challenges in our weather-impacted areas, early evaluations have revealed challenges with managing our waves of close-in cancellations, bottlenecks in information processing, and a deficiency of clear escalation procedures. We’ve taken fast steps to appropriate a few of our shortcomings, as our inner and exterior evaluations information us in longer-term options.
The success of a busy airline is the intricate symphony of a number of techniques, folks, and instruments working in tandem. Just a little background — Southwest works with three key techniques: the flight community, the plane community, and the crew community. Every should keep in sync when modifications are made to anyone; in the event that they don’t, circumstances can worsen. Because the state of affairs escalated in December and as cancellations grew, our crew scheduling perform struggled to maintain up with the overwhelming quantity of modifications and resulted in particular person crew member assignments not being up to date in a well timed method. With out up to date crew member schedules, the software program couldn’t reassign crew members to flights, so we turned to guide processes that additional contributed to disruptions for our prospects and our workers.
The communications response
So, as a communications chief … what do you do? General, our communications strategy contained three key efforts: Acknowledge the occasion and its influence; apologize for the inconveniences and disruption; and act on classes realized to scale back the danger of this occurring once more.
Our effort started with updates on pure restoration. We shared the stats of cancelled and delayed flights, options to reset the community and knowledge on what a buyer ought to do if his/her flight was cancelled. We posted each media and worker content material throughout all of our channels to maintain stakeholders knowledgeable whereas working with Southwest’s senior leaders to determine the foundation causes of the disruption.
With out having the entire data, different entities jumped in to hypothesize as to what prompted the operation to “soften down.” Unions, authorities companies, and airports shared their views — some inside hours of the problem rising. We continued to speak with workers, prospects and retailers throughout the nation to counter untimely trigger and impact tales by having each our CEO and COO clarify the evaluation effort that we launched, together with:
Our Board of Administrators forming an Operations Evaluation Committee to supervise administration’s response efforts.
- Inner evaluations of processes, know-how and instruments.
- Asking a third-party consulting agency (Oliver Wyman) to do its personal exterior overview of the operational disruption.
With almost 2 million folks whose journey plans have been cancelled or severely delayed, the communication effort needed to shortly pivot to how we have been going to answer our prospects and workers. We started a collection of efforts together with:
- Public and inner apologies with particulars for subsequent steps.
- Dealing with refunds, reimbursements and baggage restoration efforts inside the government-mandated timelines.
- Offering gestures of goodwill to each prospects and workers to humbly apologize for the inconvenience and disruption.
Chasing narratives
Together with understanding the foundation causes of the occasion and getting the operation again on observe, we had a variety of narratives to chase.
First, was the problem our know-how?
To set the document straight, our crew scheduling software program didn’t cease working throughout this occasion. Nonetheless, the speed and excessive variety of modifications in each our flight and crew networks over a number of days restricted the power to course of the massive quantity of schedule alterations utilizing automation. And that led to guide processes that additional impacted our means to shortly get well.
Second, was it our point-to-point community?
The actual fact of the matter is that our flight exercise has been at or close to the identical ranges for months, with excessive reliability. So, what occurred can’t solely be attributed to our point-to-point community. We’ve confirmed that we will function the schedule we’ve printed and nonetheless reply to irregular operations, reminiscent of climate and ATC outages.
Third, was the problem staffing?
In 2022 alone, we added greater than 11,600 workers, and we now have been purposeful in growing our ratio of workers to plane popping out of the pandemic. We had stable work bids throughout all work teams for the vacation interval and have been properly positioned with the vacation staffing assigned.
So, the place will we go from right here?
Instantly:
- We recognized and educated a bunch of workers who can present surge staffing throughout excessive climate occasions to help crew scheduling and could be mobilized through a brand new notification course of.
- We established an goal set of efficiency standards within the type of an upgraded dashboard that may assist leaders decide when to escalate an operational state of affairs.
- GE, who offers many airways with their crew optimization software program, has already offered an answer that’s in testing to assist any airline extra effectively work a backlog of damaged crew schedules.
- We enhanced and can proceed so as to add performance to our current instruments for crew members to speak electronically to crew scheduling throughout irregular operations.
- We additionally carried out organizational modifications designed to enhance coordination and communication between the Community Operations Management (NOC), Community Planning, and Crew Scheduling groups,
- We’re within the strategy of a radical overview of our readiness and capability to handle extreme winter operations, making certain we prioritize worker security throughout excessive or prolonged winter operations; that may embody evaluating new instruments and tools and analyzing present course of enhancements.
Whereas nobody at Southwest is happy with what occurred, we now have seen proof of inner delight rising as we took care of disrupted prospects – tales have been shared on social media of our off-duty workers delivering meals to these working; pilots shopping for and handing out espresso to prospects ready in gate areas; headquarters workers signing as much as be educated on inner techniques to place extra manpower behind our refunds and reimbursement effort. And, most of all, our workers offering nice hospitality on our flights by way of the restoration interval that final week of December.
We all know we’re not excellent; there’s a saying that character is revealed by what an individual says and what an individual does. Similar goes for an organization. We all know we now have work to do to restore our belief, however we’re dedicated to being America’s most liked and most dependable airline.
We is not going to relaxation till we now have carried out all we will to mitigate the dangers of one thing like what occurred in December from occurring once more. Merely put, we now have a virtually 52-year historical past of serving communities safely and with LUV. We is not going to enable every week in December to outline us; however we are going to be taught from the failure and be higher due to it.
