Last week British Airways asked their staff to work through the night and past the end of their shifts in order to sort out the chaos caused by the various system failures that plagued the opening day of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. In crisis situations like this one, and more serious examples like 9/11 in the States and 7/7 here, we often see staff really stepping up to the mark and giving freely of their energy to help their organisation and its customers out. In this case, BA staff had to take abuse from customers and morale was reported to be dropping like a stone at the end of last week. But even in this context, many of them volunteered to work at the weekend to clear the backlogs of passenger luggage – that’s dedication!
But when the dust settles and the problem is solved, how do you say ‘thank you’ to your workforce for going well beyond the call of duty? I wonder what BA will do this week for the army of ground staff and call centre workers who gradually dug them out of their nightmare opening day scenario?
Of course, one option is simply to pay them a bonus. However, I suspect that it’s actually more of blended approach that’s required to get to a point where staff think that the effort they put in this time was worth it and, more importantly, where they would do the same thing next time.
Firstly, workers want to hear the top people in the company, including the CEO Willy Walsh, say thank you. And not just internally – publicly and explicitly in the media. One thing is for sure, he will get plenty of opportunity in the next few weeks. Secondly, they want their line manager to say thank you to them directly and in fact, BA should now be specifically directing their line managers to do this in the coming days.
Next, I think that the staff should expect to see some token of the company’s appreciation for their extra efforts. This could be a bonus payment, but there are other options as well: For example, what about offering them an extra day’s leave to be taken any time in the next 6 months so that it doesn’t bring operations to a halt. Yes, this would incur a cost to BA, but in the long run would that cost be greater or lesser than the cost of doing nothing?
And I think this is my point – it’s so easy for leaders and managers in these situations to focus on what’s just happened and think “Phew! We’re out of the woods now – let’s get back to business”. But this fails to acknowledge the contribution of huge numbers of dedicated people who have gone out of their way to solve an embarrassing problem which was mostly caused by poor management decisions in the first place.
The right mindset is more like “Our people were amazing this week and there will be a situation where we need them to be amazing again in the future – How do we make sure they’re willing to do this for us when the time comes?”
Do you have any views? Have you found interesting ways of thanking staff for extraordinary contributions? Please leave a comment.
