Up in the Air: How the Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging Their Employees

When both an industry's workers and its customers report high and rising frustration with the way they are being treated, something is fundamentally wrong. In response to these conditions, many of the world's airlines have made ever-deeper cuts in services and their workforces. Is it too much to expect airlines, or any other enterprises, to provide a fair return to investors; high-quality, reliable service to their customers; and good jobs for their employees? Measured against these three expectations, the airline industry is failing. In the first five years of twenty-first century alone, U.S. airlines lost a total of $30 billion while shedding 100,000 jobs, forcing the remaining workers to give up over $15 billion in wages and benefits. Combined with plummeting employee morale, shortages of air traffic controllers, and increased congestion and flight delays, a total collapse of the industry may be coming

Is this state of affairs inevitable? Or is it possible to design a more sustainable, less volatile industry that better balances the objectives of customers, investors, employees and the wider society? Does deregulation imply total abrogation of government's responsibility to oversee an industry showing the clear signs of deterioration and increasing risk of a pending crisis?

Up In The Air explores such questions in a well-informed and engaging way, using a mix of quantitative evidence and qualitative studies of airlines from North America, Asia, Australia and Europe. It provides clear and realistic strategies foe achieving a better, more equitable balance among the interests of customers, employees and shareholders. Specifically, the authors recommend that firms learn from the innovations of companies like Southwest and Continental airlines in order to build a positive workplace culture that fosters coordination and commitment to high-quality service; labor relations policies that avoid long, drawn-out conflicts in negotiating new agreements; and business strategies that can sustain investor, employee and customer support through the ups and downs of business cycles.

The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance

Fortune magazine calls Southwest Airlines "the most successful airline in history." Drawing on extensive research and interviews with frontline Southwest employees, managers, and senior executives, The Southwest Airlines Way explains how Southwest's relationship-based performance principles can be adopted by managers in any industry, with dramatic results.

Full of frontline tales of Southwest's innovative management style, this compelling book explains how Southwest's relentless focus on high-performance relationships and its people-management practices have been the key to its unparalleled success in the airline industry. It reveals how any organization willing to invest the time and effort can learn from Southwest's management style by creating shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect among management, employees, and suppliers. This is the secret of how Southwest consistently outperforms its competitors in the high-pressure, time-sensitive airline industry.

The Southwest Airlines Way explores the policies, strategies and techniques that have led to Southwest's success and explains how these proven methods can be put to work in any organization. Based on Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell's eight years of research in the airline industry, this book unveils the secret ingredient -- high performance relationships -- that has enabled Southwest to sustain a steady 10 to 15 percent rate of growth through its history, while turning a profit in every year but its first.

Gittell explains why Southwest relies so heavily on high performance relationships -- shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect among employees, managers, unions, and suppliers. She analyzes how the company uses high performance relationships to create the enormous competitive advantage Southwest has in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among employees.