komac2
18th May 2008, 06:54
An email from one of his managers had Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe on the phone pronto. A female flight attendant had taken a male passenger home to her place for the night after a flight.
She came across the passenger outside the Auckland airport terminal building, distressed, without his bags, and without the keys for his car which was in the airport car park.
It was late, and the last ferry to Waiheke where he lived had already left.
So the flight attendant did what her boss had been insisting all Air New Zealand staff do treat everyone as a friend.
She took the passenger home for the night, gave him a bed (not hers) and breakfast and her husband helped him recover his car and baggage in the morning.
"Be friendly" is not the only the thing Fyfe has been telling his staff. "Be yourself" is another golden rule at Air New Zealand these days.
But when a pilot made an idiosyncratic remark over the aircraft PA system in an attempt to amuse passengers, a senior politician on board took umbrage.
"And it was disrespectful in the way the remark had been interpreted," concedes Fyfe.
"But if you want your staff to project themselves in a way that gives the airline a personality and the business a sharp point of difference, then what do you do in such an instance? Whack them down end of story?"
Fyfe has been pushing two other messages to his staff which he believes define the Kiwi character, and by which he wants to define the airline: exhibit the Kiwi can-do attitude, and be prepared to share your New Zealand.
In cold print it might all sound pretty corny, matters not worthy of the time and effort of the chief executive of the country's national airline carrier.
But for Fyfe, who regards the airline as basically a tourism business, the warm fuzzy stuff is important.
He explains: "When I arrived at Air NZ the business was financially sound and so on, but it didn't have a strong point of difference as an airline."
Customers asked why they came to New Zealand talked about mountains and lakes and bungy-jumping.
Asked on departure what they remembered of their visit, they talked about their interaction with ordinary New Zealanders they had met and dealt with.
"So we made a decision early on to stop talking about vision, mission, dreams and all that brand stuff, and instead define quintessential Kiwi characteristics," says Fyfe. Those characteristics were to become the airline's personality expressed through its employees, the way it projected itself.
But behind the warm fuzzies was a very sharp edge. Aviation fuel has gone through $US160 a barrel (it was $US60 when Fyfe joined Air NZ); slowing economies were making travellers of fewer people.
Fyfe says the airline makes about $5 gross profit from every $100 revenue it earns. That means whether or not a particular flight is profitable can depend on whether they carry, say, 105 people instead of 100.
"We have cut costs out of the business, we have found good routes and got the right aircraft. We can also put up prices, as can our competitors," says Fyfe.
"The challenge, as difficult times come, will be to ensure that your passenger load doesn't fall when demand drops.
"We believe if our people can rightly define our airline then we will prevent that."
Early on, Fyfe directed that 25% of the airline's marketing budget usually spent on promoting the company to potential customers would be spent marketing the company's new identity to its own staff.
And he has sought to involve more than front-line staff in his internal revolution. "If those behind front-line staff don't also protect the airline's personality, then it will quickly become a facade for the front-liners too."
So each month Fyfe spends a day (or night, as the case may be), working in overalls in the engineering hangars at Auckland or Wellington, or pushing trolleys up and down the aisle on the 737-300s.
He recently did an 11-hour day on flights from Auckland to Wellington, Christchurch, Queenstown and back to Auckland, "and I tell you, it was hard work; I was starving at the end of the long day.
"But what it does is connect me with all our staff, and as one who hasn't been a career airline executive, see what they do. You have a very different conversation with people when you are in their world."
The quid pro quo also comes once a month when an employee spends the day with Fyfe, and gets a sense of what his job is all about.
Now he has board members out on the job too "Ken Douglas loves it, he's been on the maintenance line in the hangars three times now."
At a recent Air New Zealand leadership conference in Queenstown, Fyfe invited 180 employees and the company's top 100 managers to take part the participant voted the most effective was a 25-year-old part-time baggage handler who had never spoken in front of an audience before.
"We have come a long way from the hierarchical organisation Air New Zealand once was," says Fyfe.
So with all the good vibes apparently flowing it is a surprise, then, that engineers have been threatening strike action?
Fyfe says Air NZ has 47 collective contracts to negotiate, "and while some of these can be contentious, the key message is not putting our [collective] personality to one side when we get into talks".
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4552572a13.html
She came across the passenger outside the Auckland airport terminal building, distressed, without his bags, and without the keys for his car which was in the airport car park.
It was late, and the last ferry to Waiheke where he lived had already left.
So the flight attendant did what her boss had been insisting all Air New Zealand staff do treat everyone as a friend.
She took the passenger home for the night, gave him a bed (not hers) and breakfast and her husband helped him recover his car and baggage in the morning.
"Be friendly" is not the only the thing Fyfe has been telling his staff. "Be yourself" is another golden rule at Air New Zealand these days.
But when a pilot made an idiosyncratic remark over the aircraft PA system in an attempt to amuse passengers, a senior politician on board took umbrage.
"And it was disrespectful in the way the remark had been interpreted," concedes Fyfe.
"But if you want your staff to project themselves in a way that gives the airline a personality and the business a sharp point of difference, then what do you do in such an instance? Whack them down end of story?"
Fyfe has been pushing two other messages to his staff which he believes define the Kiwi character, and by which he wants to define the airline: exhibit the Kiwi can-do attitude, and be prepared to share your New Zealand.
In cold print it might all sound pretty corny, matters not worthy of the time and effort of the chief executive of the country's national airline carrier.
But for Fyfe, who regards the airline as basically a tourism business, the warm fuzzy stuff is important.
He explains: "When I arrived at Air NZ the business was financially sound and so on, but it didn't have a strong point of difference as an airline."
Customers asked why they came to New Zealand talked about mountains and lakes and bungy-jumping.
Asked on departure what they remembered of their visit, they talked about their interaction with ordinary New Zealanders they had met and dealt with.
"So we made a decision early on to stop talking about vision, mission, dreams and all that brand stuff, and instead define quintessential Kiwi characteristics," says Fyfe. Those characteristics were to become the airline's personality expressed through its employees, the way it projected itself.
But behind the warm fuzzies was a very sharp edge. Aviation fuel has gone through $US160 a barrel (it was $US60 when Fyfe joined Air NZ); slowing economies were making travellers of fewer people.
Fyfe says the airline makes about $5 gross profit from every $100 revenue it earns. That means whether or not a particular flight is profitable can depend on whether they carry, say, 105 people instead of 100.
"We have cut costs out of the business, we have found good routes and got the right aircraft. We can also put up prices, as can our competitors," says Fyfe.
"The challenge, as difficult times come, will be to ensure that your passenger load doesn't fall when demand drops.
"We believe if our people can rightly define our airline then we will prevent that."
Early on, Fyfe directed that 25% of the airline's marketing budget usually spent on promoting the company to potential customers would be spent marketing the company's new identity to its own staff.
And he has sought to involve more than front-line staff in his internal revolution. "If those behind front-line staff don't also protect the airline's personality, then it will quickly become a facade for the front-liners too."
So each month Fyfe spends a day (or night, as the case may be), working in overalls in the engineering hangars at Auckland or Wellington, or pushing trolleys up and down the aisle on the 737-300s.
He recently did an 11-hour day on flights from Auckland to Wellington, Christchurch, Queenstown and back to Auckland, "and I tell you, it was hard work; I was starving at the end of the long day.
"But what it does is connect me with all our staff, and as one who hasn't been a career airline executive, see what they do. You have a very different conversation with people when you are in their world."
The quid pro quo also comes once a month when an employee spends the day with Fyfe, and gets a sense of what his job is all about.
Now he has board members out on the job too "Ken Douglas loves it, he's been on the maintenance line in the hangars three times now."
At a recent Air New Zealand leadership conference in Queenstown, Fyfe invited 180 employees and the company's top 100 managers to take part the participant voted the most effective was a 25-year-old part-time baggage handler who had never spoken in front of an audience before.
"We have come a long way from the hierarchical organisation Air New Zealand once was," says Fyfe.
So with all the good vibes apparently flowing it is a surprise, then, that engineers have been threatening strike action?
Fyfe says Air NZ has 47 collective contracts to negotiate, "and while some of these can be contentious, the key message is not putting our [collective] personality to one side when we get into talks".
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4552572a13.html