You tube LinkedIn Contact us


Sian Harrington, Conference Chairman, brings a report on the recent event that was hosted in Lisbon.

In today’s constantly shifting, tight margin landscape, aviation organisations need people who can access, analyse and act on information faster, who are resilient and collaborative, and who are motivated to do the best job they can, every day. But IATA research shows that HR leaders in aviation are concerned about skills, quality of leadership and future talent in the industry.
Ground Handling International’s 2nd HR Aviation Conference, held on 3-4 May at the Epic Sana hotel in an unseasonably sunny Lisbon, brought together HR practitioners and leading thinkers to explore some of the issues facing organisations and to offer some practical solutions and roadmaps. It was a lively event, with much discussion and debate among HR professionals from 14 countries. Here we outline the top ten things we learnt.

Building a culture of trust
Trust is essential to unlocking the reporting of safety-related information, commented independent human performance specialist, Dr Sarah Flaherty. With European Union regulation 376/2014 mandating aviation companies to report safety occurrences through adopting Just Culture principles, ensuring your organisation provides an atmosphere of trust is vital. Yet, too often, there is a gap between what is said and what is done, said Flaherty.
Trust, in fact, was a recurring theme of the conference, with the majority of speakers saying a key objective for HR professionals will be to promote and advance trust in an era when trust in business is at an all-time low. However, as Michael Jenkins, CEO of leadership development institute Roffey Park, pointed out that there is scepticism about innovative people management, even within the HR profession itself - and low trust is a major barrier to agile HR. 

Ditch the organisational matrix
Today, it is all about an organisational network. Eugenio Pirri, VP of people and organisational development at luxury hotel brand The Dorchester Collection, told delegates that it was time to look at their organisational design and move away from the comfort of the typical hierarchical matrix. “This is not how organisations interact and not how people communicate,” he said. Instead, he believes, you need a model based on networks of people, with formal and informal mechanisms in place to enable you to listen to feedback and act on it. Unfortunately, HR is the least likely to champion change of all managerial disciplines, said Roffey’s Jenkins, and the most common culture and organisation design is a control-based one with an internal focus. UK research finds 46% of HR leaders in large organisations identify with this model and culture.  

Engagement a priority
The aviation market needs to do a lot more to engage its people, as labour productivity falls.
It’s the people who keep us safe, stressed Sarah Flaherty. Yet “aviation is really good at the ‘stuff’ but not so good at people,” she admitted. This is a problem, added Jenkins, as research findings from McKinsey Global Institute suggest that, unless increases in labour productivity compensate for an ageing workforce, there will be a near 40% drop in GDP growth rates and a roughly 20% drop in the growth rate of per capita income around the world in the next 50 years. Yet in a workshop on employee engagement run by founder of The Global Growth Institute, Wayne Clarke, we discovered that only 10-15% of employees genuinely care about moving your business forward. So, while CEOs and the board want their managers to be more growth focused, caring, productive, responsive and collaborative, the reality on the ground is that people are disengaged and unlikely to go the extra mile for your organisation unless you really ‘walk the talk’.

Boredom in the workplace
Workers in many countries have limited job control and few opportunities to learn new things. In some sectors, ground handling included, they are in low wage, temporary and insecure rôles. Shockingly, revealed Stephen Bevan from the Institute for Employment Studies, having a bad job is worse than having no job when it comes to mental health. Research from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey found respondents who were unemployed had significantly poorer mental health than those who were employed. However, the mental health of those who were unemployed was comparable – or more often superior – to those in jobs of the poorest psychosocial quality, in other words jobs with little autonomy, security, fair effort/reward balance and ability to develop. In such environments, are employee engagement and workplace health interventions even worthwhile? asked Bevan. 

Diversity in leadership
Lars Jeschio of global executive search and leadership firm Egon Zehnder shared findings from a survey of 1,300 senior executives from 73 of the world’s leading airlines. Fewer than 5% of CEOs and 13% of top executives are female, while only 18% of airline executives differ in nationality from their airline. Yet low cost carriers perform better and have significantly higher diversity and among the 15 economically top-performing airlines in the study, there is a higher diversity of top executives across nearly all criteria compared to the remaining airlines. The commonly shared airline industry pattern is “male, mono-cultural and engineering heavy,” explained Jeschio. Where women are more prevalent, it is in HR, Legal and PR functions, while national diversity is more prevalent in Pacific and MEA airlines, which rely on international talent, given the shallow local talent pools. Why does this matter? Cluster models demonstrate that the most diverse airlines have superior economic performance, with a more dynamic, decision-ready leadership culture founded on a well-defined and strictly executed business model. The lesson is that those in HR need to become more active in driving transformation where diversity of talent is a key element.

The balance when managing risk
Steve Girdler, CEO at HireRight, pointed out that 40% of large companies screen graduates in a more robust way than their executive level hires and promotions. A show of hands in the room backed this up. This opens up risk, said Girdler, pointing to some high profile examples of global CEOs who have lied about their experience and brought their company into reputational disrepute and, in some cases, like the UK’s Co-operative Group, financial meltdown. However, there is always a balance to be found between the candidate experience and company needs, and nowhere is this more marked than in aviation, with its high screening bar. To keep candidates engaged at every stage it is vital to regularly communicate with them, he said. With frequent regulation changes, it is crucial that HR teams keep updated to remain compliant. There is a trend in aviation for submitted documents to become inadmissible for minor reasons and the need for hard copy documents can slow the process. With the world now digital, did Girdler see these hard copy requirements changing in the future? Yes he did, he said, much to the relief of those in the room.

Think like marketers and plan like advertisers
You need to work on your employer brand!
It’s not easy to attract the right frontline employees in ground handling, nor the people you want at managerial level across aviation. You need people with the right capabilities and attitude and people who take a pride in doing a job day in, day out, that carries huge responsibility. But you are fighting against many ‘sexy’ employers. Why should they work for you? A joined-up approach is required. Develop an ‘employer value proposition’, said Justine James from Talentsmoothie and Ashley Hever, talent acquisition manager for UK and Ireland at Enterprise Rent a Car, as they presented a roadmap to becoming an employer of choice. This describes the characteristics and appeal of working with your organisation, clearly defining the benefits and ways of working you offer in return for the employee’s contribution and performance. Ensure all communication is consistent with this, be it external communication when recruiting through to internal messaging.

Collective agreements and successful negotiation
Jose Manuel Santos, lawyer at Ramirez & Associados and ex-CEO of Portway Handling, gave a detailed account of the employment law environment in Portugal and concluded that social dialogue is critical to good HR and running a successful organisation. If companies embrace social dialogue they will smooth the path to successfully negotiating collective agreements and working with unions. Union members in the audience currently in discussion with Portway echoed his views that constructive dialogue was needed. Meanwhile, two ground handling employees from Portway bravely took to the stage to field questions on what it feels like to work on the frontline.    

The ultimate in automation?
Drones picking up customers’ baggage from their homes and delivering to their hotels: sounds far-fetched? Chris Lynch, transport, travel and logistics lead at PA Consulting, said increasing digitalisation of transport throws up a number of potential opportunities in the future, and even small changes in the ways bags are handled will transform the customer flying experience. He outlined four scenarios for aviation in the light of global passenger numbers rising by 400% in the last ten years and the growth of high-speed rail links destroying the profitability of some popular short routes. Lynch noted that the world’s first digital tower services are already in operation and that 36,770 new aircraft will be delivered worldwide by 2033. Innovation, increased low cost, ultra-long haul and consolidation in Europe are all trends to expect, he concluded.  

Humans are not resources!
The customer experience can never become what the employee experience is not already. According to Dorchester Collection’s Pirri: “If you don’t get it right with your employees, you won’t get it right with your customers.” Heathrow airport’s director of security, Tom Willis, echoed this. Heathrow’s vision is to give passengers the best airport service in the world. Its security vision is to create a culture where inspired teams consistently achieve exceptional performance in safety, compliance, service and efficiency. These four pillars are communicated clearly through a triangular model underpinned by development opportunities. The result is that in 2016, year-on-year performance metrics for security waiting time and staff helpfulness are at an all-time high. The secret? Move your thinking from seeing people as employees who merely come in and do the job to treating them whole people, complete with brain, emotions, voice and heart, said Willis. Humans are humans when at work, and not resources.