Tartare:
When I joined NZ, one of the first things that Robbie and a certain ex NZ employee who is now working for you did - was sack 600 LAMEs.
They outsourced heavy engine maintenance.
Holy heck - the sh1t hit the fan.
The unions screamed - circulated the usual photos of busted engines repaired with seatbelts - dire warnings about safety, loss of certain trades forever etc.
The media were in an uproar.
Do you know what happened?
Precisely... nothing.
The jets kept flying, no-one died, the airline didn't stop.
That move sent a very important message - don't mess with us, we are going to reform the business whether you like it or not.
And they did - the next stop was corporate - approx 20 per cent cost out.
It was brutal.
But it was also a clear commercially focused message to the workforce that things had to change - and were going to.
I'm sorry Tartare, but you just don't get it.
Nobody, especially not me, is denying the right of any company to trim its workforce or make major changes for self preservation. However what all of us are commenting on is the totally inept, inefficient way Qantas is trying to do it!
If your organisation needs to kick the staff in the backside and downsize then you do it, but you do it FAST and CLEAN!!! You do not do what Qantas has been doing for at least Ten years:
- Destabilising and stressing their workforce.
- Presiding over an endless "change process" of reviews by consultants and self aggrandizing management - immortalised by Margaret Jackson.
Today it appears to me that any Qantas employee is totally uncertain about their future which is an absolute and major dereliction of duty by the Board and Management.
As CEO you get to lose sleep over dealing with uncertainty and thinking the unthinkable - it is your job - managing and coping with uncertainty in order to give your frontline staff a certain predictable work environment in which they can deliver high quality goods and services to your customers.
Your staff are not paid to deal with uncertainty, YOU are! Yet what does Qantas management do???? Maximises staff uncertainty which leads to rotten morale and low quality performance.
To put that another way, what do you think would have happened to Air New Zealand if Fyffe had announced a nine month consultants review after which unspecified cuts would be made? What if the staff were constantly bombarded with messages designed to divide and conquer= "maybe you will have a job next year and maybe not"? What if he had stayed in some ivory tower in Auckland all the time instead of showing himself to the staff and leading by example?