TRANSIT SAFETY CULTURE: CONFRONTING CROSSROADS OF SERVICE DELIVERY, RESILIENCE, AND SUSTAINABILITY ? LEVERN MCELVEEN

Introduction

Transit employees are resigning, retiring, and not showing up for work due to a toxic work environment, which includes outdated work schedules, adverse working conditions, not feeling engaged, not feeling empowered, not having a voice, not feeling psychologically safe, poor safety culture, and having traumatic work experiences due to the pandemic. Transit employees work daily without a sense of transit purpose because purpose has never been defined. They experience overt acts of racism daily, they feel disrespected, they operate defective equipment, and they do not trust the transit management and leadership to provide a safe work environment. These workplace challenges are occurring across the transit industry.

The transit industry workplace has changed, and it is constantly changing and evolving, and transit leaders are not making the critical changes needed for the transit industry to thrive and reemerge successfully from these challenging times. These crises place the transit industry at a major crossroads for service delivery, resilience, and sustainability. Transit leaders must make significant changes in the transit structures, safety culture, and operations protocols to reemerge with agility. These changes must be more than talk; the change must begin with workplace humanity and community needs.

The transit industry is facing multiple crossroads in today's volatile and uncertain world and these crossroads are directly connected to service delivery, resilience, and sustainability. Even though H.R.3684 - Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed by the Biden-Harris Administration, will provide the transit industry with $107 billion over the next five years, these crossroads challenges will remain unless transit leaders make significant changes in transit structures, safety culture, and operations protocols. Transit leaders must address the systemic racism problems from the past and the ongoing challenges with diversity, equity, inclusion, and workplace issues moving forward.

?Deloitte (2021) cites, "If you are among the leaders of organizations across industries charged with navigating through this massive disruption to the workforce, you know that many of the issues driving workers [and customers} away from their employers predated the pandemic. Before March 2020, many organizations could do business without meaningfully addressing issues that cause negative worker experiences: inefficient technology, outdated ways of working, poor [safety] culture; and lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion were the norm. Back in 2016, the World Economic Forum predicted that failure to address the underlying causes of these issues would be the most significant risk to business in the future, and they were right.”

The transit industry has not effectively addressed the issues from the past such as systemic racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion, working conditions, schedules, mental health and wellness, psychological safety, belonging and a learning-centric culture. Addressing these issues will be a lot for transit leaders moving forward, an absolute lot. And it is even more when transit leaders consider service delivery goals, resilience goals, sustainability goals, inclusion goals, setting clear aspirations, setting clear performance agendas, and setting cultural goals for their systems. To this end, transit leaders, including boards and secretary of transportation must conduct a top-to-bottom assessment to get the right people in place, get the correct policy agenda in place, and get guidance out to make the systemic changes needed for a crossroads intervention. It really is time for transit leaders to buckle up, get organized, and figure out how they’re going to implement change (McKinsey & Company, 2022).

Transit Crossroads

Let us examine the crossroads in the transit industry today. According to the Washington Post (2021), the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission ordered the [WMATA] transit agency’s flagship 7000-series cars out of service [738 rail cars] Wednesday for the second time in less than three months, saying Metro had not followed the terms of a plan to reintroduce the cars after a derailment safely. In the same article, the NTSB investigates the derailment and its underlying causes, working with Metro, manufacturer Kawasaki Rail Car and its suppliers. It is still unclear why wheels were moving on their axles, but outside experts and Metro veterans said it's unusual. Metro knew about the problem as far back as 2017, although it initially appeared in a small number of rail cars. Since then, a group of senators has asked Metro to turn over a detailed timeline showing its steps to address the problem. The CEO of WMATA will resign in June 2022.

The article further cited, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is the third-busiest rail system and the sixth-largest bus system in the country. WMATA Metro ridership is down 78% from pre-pandemic times. Bus ridership is down 60%, and Metro faces a driver shortage because of nationwide labor trends and the omicron variant. This ridership and workers shortage has become a challenge for the transit industry. According to an audit released Tuesday, Metro's inability to respond to emergencies in a safe and organized way is putting first responders and passengers at risk. The Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, a regulatory agency that oversees safety on the transit agency’s rail system, issued five recommendations and 14 findings it said Metro needs to correct. The 74-page report is an audit of Metro’s emergency management, fire, and life-safety programs — coming at a time when the agency also is the subject of a federal safety probe after an October derailment.

Another article published in the Washington Post titled "Metro's emergency response puts workers, riders at risk, audit says," cites, A regulator says Metro continues to struggle with communication and coordination among various agencies. According to investigations, Metro has a history of emergency-response mistakes that have delayed evacuations and contributed to injuries or death, including a 2015 electrical fire near L'Enfant Plaza. A stalled train filled with smoke in that incident, killing a 61-year-old woman while sickening more than 80 others. In response, the Federal Transit Administration took the unprecedented step of assuming direct supervision of Metrorail safety until Congress created the safety commission in 2017. WMATA is at a crossroads of service delivery, resilience, and sustainability

According to the Charlotte Observer (2022), A CATS bus driver died Saturday after being shot in uptown Charlotte Friday night, police said. In a news release late Saturday, the driver, 41-year-old Ethan Rivera, was shot just after 9:30 p.m. in the 500 block of West Trade Street, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police said. That's near the Greyhound bus station. The bus had traveled off the road, police said. CMPD said the four passengers who were on the bus were not injured. Police have not said if they suspect or know what prompted the shooting. The investigation is ongoing, and police have not provided additional updates on Sunday morning.

The article further cited, The shooting was the latest incident involving an armed suspect and a CAT’S bus. In December, a suspect who fired a gun into a vehicle in uptown Charlotte tried boarding a bus with the weapon before being arrested, police said. Several Charlotte-Mecklenburg police bike and foot patrol officers were at Trade and Tryon streets when they heard gunshots. The officers saw a man shooting into a vehicle that was speeding away, the Observer reported at the time. Last February, a man stabbed two CATS bus passengers in Elizabeth with a machete, the Observer previously reported. The riders were attacked in the 2100 block of East 7th Street. They were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. Officers arrested 27-year-old Reginald Jakes on two counts of attempted murder. ? In 2019, a bus driver was shot while sitting in her bus near the uptown Transportation Center, the Observer reported at the time. Police arrested a suspect nearby and said the shooting may have been domestic-related.

On May 26, 2021, a?mass shooting?occurred at a?Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority?(VTA)?rail yard?in?San Jose, California, United States. Ten people were killed during the shooting, including the gunman, identified as 57-year-old VTA employee Samuel James Cassidy, who died by suicide.?It is the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the?San Francisco Bay Area. As a result of the shooting, service throughout the VTA light rail system was suspended for months. According to the Mercury News article title, VTA shooting witness blast management over the massacre. “The stage was set for this disaster.” A VTA worker who heard the screams and witnessed the tragic aftermath of the Bay Area’s deadliest workplace shooting lashed out at the transit agency’s leaders, accusing them of ignoring a toxic work culture and dysfunctional management that may have put the shooter “over the edge.” This week, signalman Kirk Bertolet lambasted the agency for "not wanting to get to the bottom of this."

Transit leaders across the industry are reducing service because they cannot maintain enough operators to meet daily service requirement. I have seen transit postings on LinkedIn and other sources offering signing bonus up to $3,000 for new operators. A signing bonus will not improve service delivery, resilience, nor sustainability. I find the signing bonus recruitment action by transit leaders to be a cruel irony. A $3,000 signing bonus to get people to come and work in the same toxic workplace that employees are leaving every day. Rather, addressing the serious toxic culture in the transit work environment.

According to McKinsey & Company, research shows that?only 22 percent of employees believe that their leaders have a clear direction?for the organization. Dissatisfaction with pay and Covid-related problems are not the only reason frontline workers are quitting in droves. In the transit industry, another is dissatisfaction with their transit managers and leaders.?McKinsey & Company (2022) cites, workers are hungry for trust, social cohesion, and purpose. They want to feel that their contributions are recognized and that their team is truly collaborative. They desire clear responsibilities and opportunities to gain experience and grow. They expect their sense of purpose to align with that of their transit system. And they want an appropriate physical and digital environment that gives them the flexibility to achieve that elusive work-life balance. Providing this top-notch leadership in a transit environment is not just lip service; it requires a profound reorientation and transformation away from the traditional top-down model the transit industry is accustomed.

I have provided a snapshot of crisis within the transit workplace environment today, and the safety culture outlook does not look good. These crises place the transit industry at a significant crossroads regarding effective service delivery, resilience, and sustainability. Transit CEOs are being called upon to make decisions they have never been trained for. For example, transit leaders do not understand the mental health and wellness challenges transit employees are dealing with daily from the transit workplace environment, and they do not understand the moral injuries caused by the transit toxic work culture. However, they must address these issues moving forward.

Reemerging

As transit leaders reemerge from the COVID-19 experience, they have the unique opportunity to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture now, because service delivery, resilience, and sustainability, are inextricably linked to a transit system’s safety culture. However, humanity must be at the forefront of this agenda. Carolyn Dewar (2022) cites, “Resilience and humility go together. If you are grounded in your organization’s purpose, it gives you energy to navigate the storms. Humility also helps you to recognize that you don’t know everything, so in moments of crisis you reach out for help; you learn.” Transit leaders who make their employees feel safe are likely to succeed as their transit system reemerges and will keep employees and customers safe long into the future. Transit safety culture has an opportunity to become the differentiator between service delivery, resilience, and sustainability. While there are myriad possibilities for how transit leaders can respond to the frontline employees, managers, and the entire transit workforce needs, developing a transit sustainable safety culture is vital.

Transit leaders must take a comprehensive view of its safety culture as the system reemerge by rethinking its transit system racial structures, practices, and operating models. Transit leaders must collaborate with frontline employees, managers, and the entire workforce to establish shared norms, change management, building trust with frontline employees, and maintaining vertical and horizontal transparent communication regarding structural and operational issues. Transit leaders must design the workforce experience with humans at the center and safety culture must be an essential strategy.

?Frontline Employees and Middle Managers

As a former frontline worker, I cannot help but think of the pain and suffering frontline employees, and middle managers (managers in the middle) are experiencing in the transit workplace environment today. While the media sources report transit infrastructure and operations problems in the transit industry, rarely, anything is written on the impact these crises have on frontline employees’ middle managers, and the entire workforce. Transit leaders must learn that the best solutions come from painful situations. In the transit toxic work culture, it is difficult for employees to maintain a moral commitment to the transit system, which may be a rationale why so many transit employees are leaving. For example, I read the WMATA Control Room Report. This report cited serious confrontation between control room employees and their managers to the extent that profound name-calling occurred that led to the point of conflict. Image, the stress levels employees are working under in the control room where they are disrespected. The control room is the lifeblood of transit operations. If mass confusion occurs in the transit control room, as reported, the entire transit system is unsafe, and transit employees are suffering from moral injuries.

Carucci and Praslova (2022) cite that moral injury is experienced as a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one's moral belief in high-stakes situations and potentially harm others physically, psychologically, socially, or economically. The pandemic and resulting upheaval of the workplace have shone a bright spotlight on organizational experiences we have too long written off as mere annoyances or ineffective management. But as it turns out, their consequences can be more damaging than we understood. The mass?exodus?from our workplaces is, in part, a proclamation that people can’t — and won’t — tolerate mistreatment, injustice, and incompetence from their leaders anymore, particularly at the expense of their dignity and values.

Moral injury?has been shown to lead to lasting psychological, physical, spiritual, behavioral, and social harm. Psychological reactions include grief, anger, anxiety, guilt, shame, or disgust. Some individuals may experience a spiritual or existential crisis or become physically ill. As stated, transit employees in the workplace are hurting. Transit employees yearn for a sense of humanity and community to be part of their work experience. They need leaders who will help protect, honor, and strengthen their values and moral center, not put them into positions where they feel forced to compromise or abandon them (Carcucci and Praslova, 2022).

Deloitte (2021) cites that those employers winning in today's hypercompetitive market understand their workers, articulate who they are, declare what they stand for as employers, and then live up to those expectations. This is not an easy task—so how do they do this? They do this by using human-centric design thinking that places the worker [and the customer] at the center and challenges past and ongoing biases. Transit leaders must deeply understand their workers at all levels. Transit leaders must understand what drives their workers' choices; what they are feeling; what they are saying to their co-workers; customers, and families, how they describe their work experience, or what it is like to work for a particular transit system, and what motivate them? Transit leaders can and must make these systemic changes in the future, and they can begin by using a human-centric design thinking model that places the workers and customers at the center and challenges the systemic bias in transit.

?Transit leaders at all levels must articulate who they are and declare what they stand for as an employer and define transit purpose. Transit leaders must develop a core value and brand that resonates with the employees' lived experiences—one that communicates what meaningfully differentiates their transit system in the highly competitive market for talent. Transit leaders must live up to those core values and brand expectations. Transit leaders must design an effective workforce experience strategy and capability that drives the transit system's needs and desires by partnering with functions across the transit system that influence the lived experience at work (Deloitte, 2021).

?The path to sustainable and inclusive growth lies with transit leaders building resilience now. Transit leaders can decide whether to lead in these new ways and, in doing so, will seize a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consciously evolve the very nature, impact their role, and change the toxic work culture that lives in the transit workplace. An excellent transit CEO will see that this moment is a unique opportunity for self-calibration, with profound implications for the transit systems. McKinsey and Company (2022) suggest that as transit leaders begin to seize the unique opportunity at hand to recalibrate their personal, team, and transit system structures and operating models, they should reflect on the following questions:

?How have we worked differently to enable the impossible to happen during the pandemic (including our decision-making, processes, resource allocation, communication, and location)?

·????????What learnings and new muscles should we bring forward into the transit system for the future?

·????????How will this change my day-to-day as I run the transit system as CEO?

Wake up, Grow Up, and Show Up

Transit Leaders must wake up, grow up, and show up moving forward to implement a sustainable safety culture that includes a human-centric design thinking model in the transit industry that empowers employees and teams to design products, services, systems, and experiences that address transit core needs for improving service delivery, resilience, and sustainability. Transit leaders must wake up to the fact that transit employees are in pain, suffering, and being morally injured by their workplace; they must grow up to the movements in housing, health care, mental illness, education, job opportunities, diversity, equity, and inclusion and the crossroads adversely affecting the transit industry and they must show up for their employees to believe in them and their leadership because transit is at the intersectionality of these disparities that impact the transit service community.

Wake up, grow up, and show up are not only about transit leaders addressing employees’ safety concerns, but also opening more of themselves up to the workforce and identify their own biases. It is also about being the transit system rock during a time fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Employees need to see that their leader is vulnerable, empathetic, and making decisions according to employees' values. Studies have found that solid performers balance keen insight into their stakeholders' priorities with an unrelenting focus on delivering effective service. Transit CEOs should start by developing an astute understanding of their employees, customers’ and stakeholders’ needs and motivations, and then get employees on board by driving for performance and aligning them around the goal of value creation (Dewar, Keller, Sneader, and Strovink, 2022).

Transit leadership at all levels can confront this unique moment in transit history by leading in expedient and ingenious ways. COVID-19 has created a massive humanitarian challenge for the transit industry: transit workers died from COVID-19, thousands of transit workers contracted the virus, ridership is down tremendously, an abrupt dislocation of how employees work, how riders behave, and how supply change functions. Employees need transit leaders to show up. Transit leaders must pay close attention to employees’ working conditions with safety concerns that have always been there but have gone overlooked or were not considered necessary until the pandemic helped made those characteristics more pronounced.

Wake up, grow up, and show up become the adjustment for changes. When transit leaders show up at an incident, such as an accident, derailment, shooting, or mass shooting, employees view this behavior as just showing up because the media is present or to keep the incident out of the media. Employees also feel that leaders show up to place blame on them. Unfortunately, employees do not see leaders showing up as having legitimacy. I have heard transit employees make a statement like you only see them when something negative happens.

Get to Know Your Employees

Getting to know the transit employees will play a crucial role in motivating them to deliver their level best. Knowing employees helps managers understand their needs and expectations from the transit system. Transit leaders need to know whether their team members are happy with their jobs or not? Transit leaders should not make employees feel ignored or left out because employees will never take things seriously, even safety. Transit leaders should show up often and ask good questions?when they meet with them to get to know them. Transit leaders should inquire about what their job involves or what employees like about working at the transit system? Transit leaders should ask one or two open-ended questions that encourage them to share critical details about important things they value. Transit leaders should listen carefully to their answers and respond in a way that shows their interest. Transit leaders should take time to sit with employees to understand their expectations, interest levels, grievances, or any other problems they face in their day-to-day operations. Knowing employees?will help transit leaders extract the best out of staff members. They will develop a sense of belonging and feel empowered.

Transit leaders need to understand that transit employees need to be appreciated to perform consistently and productively. Problems arise when transit leadership does not acknowledge the arduous work of employees. Transit leaders must make employees feel special, empower, and engage. Remember, you are not paid for just sitting in the C-Suite and passing on instructions to your team members. Some managers do not even know their team members appropriately. Transit leaders should regularly sit with their team members to realize them, evaluate their work, and provide correct feedback. As transit leaders, it is your responsibility to guide your employees and help them achieve their targets within a stipulated time frame.

Summary

Transit employees are tired, in pain, suffering moral injuries from a toxic work environment and grieving from the loss of their co-workers. Transit employees want a renewed sense of purpose in their work, which the transit industry does not offer. Transit employees want social and interpersonal connections with their leaders, managers, and cross function relations. They want to feel a sense of shared identity. Yes, they want pay, benefits, and rewards, but most importantly, transit employees want to feel valued by the transit system and transit leaders.

Going forward, transit leaders must design the workforce experiences with humanity at the center. Transit leaders can create this experience using human-centered design thinking that places the employees at the center and challenging the long-standing biases entrenched in the transit environment. Transit leaders must deeply understand transit employees’ pain and suffering from the toxic work environment. Transit leaders must understand what drives frontline workers and middle managers, what motivates them, and what drains their energy? Transit leaders must develop transit purpose, core values, and brand that feel authentic with frontline employees' work experience and communicate effective service delivery, resilience, and sustainability. And transit leaders must live up to those expectations they make to their employees through the human-center design.

Transit industry leaders must understand that the path to sustainable, inclusive growth lies with transit leaders building resilience now. The transit industry is at a crossroads and in immediate need to address profound structures and operations changes, such as systemic racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion, psychological safety, and the toxic workplace safety culture. If the transit CEO and other senior leaders (Boards, secretaries of transportation, governors, and elected officials) are not committed to creating a culture that values humanity, including diversity, equity, and inclusion, progress will never unfold. If the past 18 months have taught transit leaders anything, it is the fact that employees crave investment in the human aspect of work.

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