Restarting a business after a crisis-related shutdown is one of the most demanding managerial challenges. To invoke an aviation analogy, getting ready for take-off for the first time after a lengthy grounding is fraught with potential problems. This article suggests five priority action items — the START Check Items — to get an aviation business’ workforce ready for take-off.
Restarting Can be Harder Than Shutting Down
Shutting down a business due to a major crisis such as COVID-19 is an extraordinarily consequential and painful undertaking for employees, customers, suppliers and communities in which a business is embedded. Restarting a business can be an even bigger challenge, especially after a lengthy shutdown. The restart process is fraught with potential pitfalls. This applies particularly to aviation and other safety-critical businesses. This article suggests five workforce-related priority action items — the START Check Items — that aviation businesses ignore at their peril when restarting after a crisis-related shutdown. These five START Check Items are: Stress, Teams, Assertiveness, Re-acclimatization and Training.
1. Stress
Stress can be a significant safety risk in the best of times. In times of crisis, stress tends to increase significantly. During the restart process, aviation businesses need to be able to detect and manage employee stress:
Understand different sources of stress: A major crisis such as COVID-19 almost certainly causes increased stress and possibly even trauma. Loss of employment and health insurance coverage can give rise to existential fears. Individual employees or their family members might have been infected with COVID-19. In the worst of cases, employees might have to mourn the loss of family members or friends.
Remember that restarting a business is not necessarily the end of the crisis: In many cases, businesses will need to restart prior to a crisis being over for good. Just because a company has found ways to reopen does not mean that the underlying cause of the crisis has disappeared magically overnight. Post-crisis developments can come in different trajectories, including W-shaped recoveries. These can entail multiple recurrences of, for example, COVID-19 outbreaks. Sources of employee stress might well be extant for a considerable time after a business has restarted.
Put in place workforce support: Businesses should put in place measures that protect both physical and mental health. In addition to provision of appropriate personal protective equipment and safe facilities, such measures could include continuing support for redundant or furloughed employees, possibly by tapping into government subsidy schemes, extended health insurance coverage for employees and their families, internal or external mental health support programs, and peer counseling resources.
2. Teams
Functioning teams are the building block of any successful business. Aviation leaders should not assume that restarting a business will automatically restore team effectiveness akin to an on/off switch. There are three dimensions to effective teams that deserve close attention:
Restore trust in team leadership: Shutting down a business usually entails making tough choices. Team leaders often need to make painful decisions that can have existential consequences for team members and their families. No matter how thoughtful and empathetic a team leader might be, decisions affecting individual team members such as lay-offs or furloughs can be perceived as a breach of personal trust. This can cause lasting damage to vertical team relations. In such cases, company leaders need to restore the trust between team leaders and team members.
Ensure team cohesiveness: Crises often have different impacts on different team members. Some team members are made redundant. Some might be put on unpaid leave. Others might stay on the payroll. Differential experiences during a crisis can potentially cause bad feelings, grudges and challenging inter-personal relationships among team members. Company leaders need to remain sensitive to this potential impairment of team cohesiveness and take appropriate action to repair horizontal team relations.
Pay attention to team composition: A crisis can lead to significant losses of team competences due to redundancies and other departures such as early retirements. During the restart process, aviation leaders need to ensure sufficiency of required qualifications within each team.
3. Assertiveness
Workforce assertiveness — the propensity to speak up when things go wrong or, ideally, before things go wrong — is one of the foundations of any effective safety management system. Aviation leaders need to engage with their workforce decisively to ensure assertiveness:
Be aware of factors that might impact workforce assertiveness: In many businesses, employees are reluctant to speak up and to publicly challenge authority in the best of times. During the tail-end of a crisis when loss of employment can remain a real possibility, this reluctance can be more pronounced.
Expressly champion just culture: When restarting a business after a crisis-related shutdown, it is incumbent upon aviation leaders to lead by example and to champion a company’s just culture at every appropriate opportunity.
Reinforce voluntary reporting systems: Even if aviation leaders consistently embody a company’s just culture, there well might be some employees who will not be comfortable speaking out publicly. Aviation businesses need to provide alternative information channels such as company-internal anonymous or confidential voluntary reporting system (see also “Five Steps to an Effective Internal Voluntary Reporting System” in the November/December 2018 issue of Aircraft Maintenance Technology).
4. Re-acclimatization
Most aviation businesses operate at high clock speeds. Employees need to be at the top of their game and need to be comfortable to work in a high-pressure environment. Aviation business need to put in place a viable ramp-up plan that brings employees back up to speed:
Be realistic about time frames: After a lengthy shutdown, employees will need time to get used to the physical and mental demands of a fast-paced work environment again. Even Olympic athletes need time to regain their peak performance levels after a period of inactivity, perhaps due to an injury. In aviation lingua, safely climbing to cruising altitude from take-off simply takes times.
Prioritize safety over speed: As employees adjust to high clock speed operations, there likely is a higher risk of accidents. Aviation businesses need to stay alert regarding risk mitigation and would be well advised to prioritize safety over speed of recovery.
Adjust workload planning accordingly: Aviation leaders need to be careful to not exacerbate risks by over-loading their workforce prematurely. Aviation businesses might need to adjust operational workload planning approaches and underlying standard capacity assumptions for individual employees and teams alike.
5. Training
Maintaining workforce proficiency is not easy in the best of times. When restarting an aviation business after a lengthy shutdown, restoration of proficiency can be particularly challenging. Aviation businesses might want to consider the following:
Refresh basics too: In normal circumstances, recurrent training tends to focus on reinforcing advanced knowledge and advanced skills. However, a shutdown can lead to loss of routine even with regards to basic skills. There well might be a potential need for special refresher training, possibly simulator-based, for basics such as standard maintenance practices.
Allow for sufficient time: Refreshing basic and advanced skills and ensuring compliance with regulatory recent experience requirements are likely to result in significant training lead times prior to restarting a business. In addition, the state of technology is likely to have moved on. New ADs and SBs are likely to have been issued. New manual revisions are likely to have become effective. All of this requires training time too.
Rebuild muscle memory: In any well-run aviation business, work is performed in accordance with properly approved written standards. Literally flying by the seat of one’s pants is not good practice. However, as much as working in accordance with manuals and checklists is a mainstay of aviation safety, in many areas, muscle memory matters greatly as well. Aviation businesses would be well advised to be deliberate about creating opportunities for rebuilding employee muscle memory.
Ready for Take-off
Restarting a business can be an even more demanding challenge than shutting it down in the first place. Getting ready for take-off after a lengthy forced grounding is fraught with potential workforce-related pitfalls. This article suggest the START Check Itemsas a tool for leaders of aviation and other safety-critical businesses to get their workforce ready for restarting after a crisis-related shutdown.Dr. Marc Szepan is a Lecturer at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. Previously, he was a senior executive at Lufthansa. His primary professional experience has been in leading technical and digital aviation businesses based in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford.
