TRANSIT SAFETY CULTURE: COVID-19 REFLECTIONS AND THE URGENCY OF THE PRESENT

TRANSIT SAFETY CULTURE: COVID-19 REFLECTIONS AND THE URGENCY OF THE PRESENT

BY

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LEVERN MCELVEEN

Introduction

The rapid spread of Covid-19 throughout the world resulted in an estimated 60-80 percent of the world population been affected. It infected over 138 million people and killed three million globally. In the United States, over 564,000 deaths occurred (Binnemaison, M., 2021). Hundreds of these deaths occurred in the transit industry. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the determining impact among the various racial and ethnic groups. Inequalities in the social factors regarding health, income and wealth, access to health care and utilization, education, diversity, equity and inclusion, discrimination, transportation, and housing were made apparent. These were the walls that separated us, the dividing walls of hostility.

It was the far-reaching impact of the disease that touched our immediate lives and our safety and security. Stay-at-home orders were issued, mask mandates, restrictions imposed that led to an economic downturn, employers were faced with demands to redesign the workplace, social distancing was a mandate making mass transit commuting impossible, resulting in a 75% decrease in demand. Factories where workers worked near one another, were forced to close. The untold stress on health care workers and caregivers was acute, as well as shortages of medical supplies (Bauer, L., Broady, K., Edelberg, W., O’Donnell, J. 2020). Some would say that it took a pandemic for Americans to express a collective appreciation for health care workers while transit workers are still waiting to be recognized. However, shortages were not just limited to medical supplies but to food – dry goods, dairy, and meats.

During 2020, daily, I listened to relentless news stories of persons suffering from Covid, families losing loved ones, and I was heartbroken learning about the loss in the transit industry, and stories of the many innocent lives lost brought tears to my eyes. The suffering continued and, on each day, with no end in sight. I found myself praying for my family, friends, and even transit workers that they remain safe, praying for strangers, and even praying for those who choose to ignore the warnings broadcasted everywhere. Wondering to myself, is there no balm in Gilead?

And just when you think matters could not get any worse, in May 2020, we witnessed the premature death of George Floyd at the hands of a law enforcement officer, acting with a depraved heart, showing no mercy, indifferent to human life. This was the tipping point, Floyd's final words, "I can't breathe," became emblazoned on signs and chanted by crowds not just in the United States but from Sydney, Australia to Cape Town, South Africa, Paris, France to Seoul, South Korea. Persons gathered in solidarity protesting injustice. People around the world recognized inequalities and racial discrimination and pushed for change in their own countries. Protesters were calling for a reckoning with the past (Haynes, S. 2020).

Historically, while the journey may be different around the world, the impact of structural racism, stop and search, poverty, and exclusion are the same everywhere. For it is now that a reckoning with the past meets the urgency of the present. Within the United States, protests from Seattle, Washington to Miami, Florida were held. The term "systemic racism," once confined to academic and activist circles, now became the watchword of the day. It is clear that it is time for a change. In his memoir, "Remember This House," James Baldwin reminds us that "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced” (Haynes, S. 2020). For those of us old enough to remember and understood the magnitude of the events of 2020 – the pandemic, civil disobedience, and social unrest require us to look back over our lives and reflect. It is also time for us, individually and collectively, to stand up and help make the changes that will promote social harmony.

Despite the turmoil of the pandemic and its impact, we watched the walls fall – the walls of dissension, the walls of hostility. The walls continue to fall. It was this single phenomenon that connected people and places in their sorrow. We witnessed a change in the human spirit, a sharing of human kindness, a new respect for life and care, and concern for not just our neighbors but strangers as well. It was a year of empowerment sparked by the urgent diverse movement for social justice. Social distancing resulted in a boom in online shopping. We were forced to rethink our society, balancing work-life; looking ahead, the future of work will not be fully remote, but it will not be clustered in little offices either. We now emphasize balancing productivity with personal needs; flexibility will be the ultimate job perk. By November of 2020, Pfizer and Moderna announced their vaccines were 90% effective at preventing Covid 19 (Morris, P., 2020). However, emergency use authorization by the FDA would come later.

We learned a lot about ourselves during 2020. No longer taking for granted the simple pleasures of life, such as talking to our children more and listening to their responses. I took a genuine interest in my neighbors and, after nearly 20 years, actually noticed them. I appreciated the occasional exercise, simply walking around the block, admiring the sunshine. Restricted routines and shopping required me to become more creative, and I found myself enjoying cooking from scratch. Something I had reserved in recent years to special holidays only. But most of all, I realized how much I deeply missed my children and grandchildren, the hugs and kisses, celebrations, and holiday gatherings. It is not the same, having to stand at the curbside waving and blowing air kisses. One of the most debilitating threats of 2020 was a sense of helplessness. As a whole, there is a universal belief in all of us, in our own fortitude, that we possess the ability to triumph over any crisis, individually and collectively.

The Urgency of the Present

McKinsey & Company cites, the good news is that with advances in listening techniques, behavior science, advanced analytics, two-way communication channels, and other technologies, leaders can address employee experience in a more targeted and dynamic way. While drilling down on which employees need more and varied types of support, they can also tailor actions that create widely shared feelings of well-being and cohesion across the workforce. Every challenge brings with it an opportunity.

To evolve and return stronger, McKinsey & Company suggests that organizations like the transit industry focus on effectiveness, mental health, and well-being and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They noted that most organizations had done well in addressing immediate safety and stability concerns. But a full return requires an organization-wide commitment to a broader range of needs and the strongest drivers of work experience, effectiveness, and wellness. For decades, need-based theories of motivation have emphasized the importance of need fulfillment on employee motivation and behavior. Applied to employee experience management, transit system leaders should seek to address the broader workforce's most critical, prominent needs while taking stock of different segments and frontline employees' unique needs. McKinsey & Company research found a strong correspondence between employees’ stated needs and the underlying drivers of their engagement, well-being, and work effectiveness. There is a tremendous opportunity now for transit leaders because of COVID-19 to rethink the workplace and the flexibility transit leaders afford employees. Effectiveness, mental health awareness, diversity, equity, and inclusion would be a great first step.

?McKinsey & Company (2021) survey cites, as it turns out, most companies did a solid job of addressing their employees' basic needs of safety, stability, and security during the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis (no distinction between private versus public organizations). However, those needs evolve, calling for a more sophisticated approach as organizations and systems enter the next phase. The return phase presents an opportunity for the transit industry leaders to rethink the employee experience to respect individual preferences—home lives, skills and capabilities, mindsets, personal characteristics, and other factors—while adapting to rapidly changing circumstances.

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With the threat of a second wave of COVID-19 infections or other disruptions, transit leaders would be well served to codify an approach to mitigating further effects of this landscape-scale crisis. To be successful in the future, McKinsey & Company suggests leaders continue to meet the need for safety and security to include psychological safety and mental health safety. Potential actions to ensure safety and security include demonstrating compassionate leadership. Leaders should make a positive difference in people's lives by demonstrating awareness, vulnerability, and empathy. Leaders should exhibit deliberate calm and bounded optimism. In communication, transit leaders need to strike the right balance between realism about the challenges ahead and confidence that the organization will find its way through the crisis.

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Additionally, to be successful in the future, McKinsey & Company suggests that leaders invest in relationships. While leaders may naturally focus inward on the business itself, research results show that sustaining trust and acknowledging employee efforts are critical to employee engagement, well-being, and effectiveness. Organizations building social capital during earlier phases of the crisis will be in better positions than others as the workforce transitions to the return phase. McKinsey & Company suggests that leaders should invest in the development of the employee-to-employee relationship. It would be a mistake to assume that the camaraderie sustained many employees early in the crisis will endure long term. Leaders need to take active steps to ensure continued relationship building, particularly for remote workers. Many of the best ideas will be bottom-up, so transit leaders often need only to create the space and resources for employee creativity to take hold.

April Rinne (2021) cites, the time to prepare for change is not when it hits. It is before it hits, and during the times of relative calm. Reacting to change in the moment will keep transit leaders forever on the defensive, and the consequences can be severe. Transit leaders cannot see where the future is heading because their attention is consumed with dodging the next curveball. This exposes your transit system to unnecessary risks and overlooked opportunities. It is a recipe for frustration and lagging performance at best—collapse at worst. Rinne further cited all too often, leaders assume that change can be “managed” and controlled, as if in a vacuum. Change management books abound and feed this narrative. But in today’s world in flux, change management is insufficient.

Transit leaders must start with a new mindset about safety changes. Navigating changes well is both art and science. It requires the right strategy and the right mindset. If transit leaders' mindset is rooted in safety changes and they have become comfortable with it, then they cannot help but see changes—good or bad, big, or small, expected, or unwelcome—as an opportunity for growth and improvement. The problem is that many transit leaders get these dynamics backward. Mindset drives strategy, not the other way around.

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Transit Safety Culture: Sustainability

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The National Football League (NFL) is allowing players to have decals on the back of helmets bearing the names or initials of victims of systemic racism and police violence. The initiative signals a groundbreaking step for the NFL, which has typically tried to stay out of politics and social issues. With the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests across the country and NBA players last week in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, the NFL may be trying to avoid a similar action by its players. Plus, the NFL’s blackballing of Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee and league commissioner Roger Goddell admitting earlier this summer the league was wrong for not listening is still fresh in many players’ minds. A list of names and initials for use on the helmet decals is was put together by the league and the NFL Players Association. Players have been encouraged to provide names and initials they want to use for the initiative, which will last the entire season (Wilner, 2020).

NFL players have been allowed to choose a decal with one of six messages to place on the back of their helmets: “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “It Takes All of Us,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Inspire Change” and “Say Their Stories.” Last season, the N.F.L. also allowed players to display messages such as “Stop Hate” and “Black Lives Matter” on their helmets, as well as the names of Black people, such as?George Floyd,?Breonna Taylor,?Trayvon Martin, and Ahmaud Arbery, whose deaths set off widespread protests.?The efforts represent a continued shift for the league, which in the past had been criticized as slow to support or hostile to players who had demonstrated against racism and police violence (Levenson, 2021).

Despite the volatility, complexities, uncertainties, and ambiguities of Coronavirus COVID-19 and the new Delta Variance, transit leaders are not moving forward with strategies in developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture in the transit industry. Transit leaders do not have a safety culture mindset; therefore, they can never develop successful safety culture strategies. But the fundamental question must be asked, why? What are the basic rationales behind transit leaders' failure to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture post COVID-19? Is it a lack of a mandate? Is it a fact that the rank-and-file frontline workers are African Americans and people of color? Is it a fact that safety culture is not part of the leadership narrative, despite transit employees' deaths, fears, and risks of further exposures, anxieties, depression, and well-being? Is it the fact that transit leaders are selfish and do not care about the workers they lead? Is it the fact that systemic racism is still prevalent in the transit industry? Is it that transit leaders do not know how to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture? Why is there no safety mindset among transit leaders?

?My 45-years’ experience in the transit industry leads me to say the answer to the question is yes to all the above and more. Despite what the answer may or may not be, I do not hear real, honest talk about developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture in the transit industry media reports. Why? Where is the sense of urgency? Transit leaders benefit from not having a sustainable safety culture because they get to hide their vulnerabilities; they are not held accountable for workers safety; they are not responsible for poor service quality, and they do not have to create and maintain a culture that values diversity, equity, inclusion, individuality, and social harmony. Or it could be that transit leaders are obsessed with their power. That is, I do not have to answer to those below me.

?Social Psychologist Vanessa Bohn discusses why failing to recognize one's ability to influence (power) can lead leaders to miss opportunities or misuse power. She cites that if you have control, you do not need to understand what is going on in the heads of people who do not have power, as much as the reverse relationship. Because you just do not need them as much to get ahead and to make things happen. So, when you are in a position of power, you tend not to put yourself in the other person’s perspective. Be careful, transit leaders, this behavior could backfire on you. Bohn further cites, we walk through our lives, and we do not realize how many people notice us and, because they notice us, how many people might imitate our behavior or change their behavior because of something we did or said.

?I do not profess to be a learned scholar or an expert in words; however, I do not apologize to my readers for constantly repeating the fact that I worked in the transit industry for 45-years at the transit, local, state, and federal levels, because, like you, I have a story to tell.?I hope that one day my story will be an inspiration for a young transit safety professional struggling to understand the structures of the transit industry. And I hope you are telling your story as well. As I have stated in previous articles, transit operates in a political environment. Until elected political leaders demand the development and implementation of a sustainable safety culture, transit leaders will continue to ride the tide with no real concerns about their frontline workers and the middle managers or the managers in the middle.

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As I read the McKinsey & Company articles, I was impressed by how they described a sustainable safety culture and even cited how to develop it. Before offering their suggestions, let me make it patently clear to readers that every system has a safety culture, good, bad, or indifferent. The transit industry has an indifferent safety culture with multiple accidents and incidents, tremendous absenteeism, significant turnover in employment, workers who lack purpose and initiative, and a dissatisfied ridership and industry without resilience and sustainability. A failure to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture means the safety culture will create itself, good, bad, or indifferent.

?A safety culture speaks to how things get done in a transit system environment and the associated attitudes, behaviors, and norms. When leaders fail to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture, the safety culture will lack a sense of purpose, it will lack a sense of psychological safety, it will lack a sense of belonging, and it will lack diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with many other safety culture factors. For those transit leaders that desire to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture in the transit industry, you may want to consider the recommendations offered by McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey & Company (2021) suggests developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture well, transit systems leaders should define the list of sustainability topics (core values) that matter for the transit system, either because they are essential to the employees, passengers, or both, and because they are the areas in which the transit system is uniquely positioned to make a difference in service quality. ?I published an article titled Transit Strategic Safety Culture Paradigm (TSSCP) in July 2019 in the Professional Safety Journal (PSJ) that offered similar core values.

In the article, I presented a safety culture maturity model for transit leaders to develop and implement a sustainable transit safety culture. Today, I would add to the mature model, post-pandemic, core values such as mental health and wellness, diversity, equity and inclusion, a transit-centric learning culture, psychological safety, sense of belonging, collectivism, and social harmony. These safety core values are the things transit leaders must address to create safety culture sustainability. These core values will help transit system leaders make better decisions on resourcing and organizing the safety issues that matter to their employees and passengers. McKinsey (2021) cites, "When it comes to supporting sustainability work at the topic level, our experience suggests that a modular organizational design—rather than one holistic, central sustainability organization—often works best. A modular design gives companies the nimbleness to address emerging topics in a more agile way.”

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As sustainability becomes more of a strategic and operational imperative in the transit industry, transit leaders must lead the way to set up a sustainable transit system safety culture that is right for their systems. To make sustainability an actual transit system core value system-wide and a pillar of transit strategy, transit CEOs and senior executives at the board levels must be leading from the front. McKinsey & Company (2021) cites, in our experience, leaders are most effective at doing so when they follow these three strategies—Embed sustainability in the transit system’s strategy-setting process. This is a prerequisite for effective sustainability management—and something that senior transit leaders are best positioned to do. The goal is not simply to have an excellent sustainability strategy but rather a system-wide strategy that includes sustainability as a core component. — Shape the portfolio to reflect an integrated strategy.

Once a transit system safety culture sustainability-related priorities/core values are clear, transit leaders must make decisions on capital allocation, R&D funding, and portfolios accordingly—Scale-up sustainable transit practices through a complete transformation. To incorporate sustainability in transit planning and empower and motivate the entire system to act on these issues, leaders should approach safety culture sustainability as any other new large-scale change effort, like transit development. It is essential to be clear about which sustainability topics the system will and will not prioritize to ensure buy-in across the transit system.

Transit Safety Culture: Adaptability and Resilience

Transit systems?need to be ready for the next crisis. That doesn’t mean reacting to the next challenge that comes their way but rather?being prepared to meet it?when it arrives. There is one tool above all others that can help transit leaders do that, which is adaptability. According to McKinsey & Company, Adaptability is the ability to learn flexibly and efficiently and apply that knowledge across situations. It is not so much a skill as a meta-skill—learning how to learn and be conscious of when to put that learner's mind into action. By becoming aware of and open to change now, transit leaders can control uncertainty before pressures build to the point where altering course is much more complex or even futile.

But transit leaders do not put in the arduous work of learning and mastering something new like developing and implementing a sustainable transit culture unless compelling motivation exists. When that motivation arrives, it is often accompanied by pressure—to avert failure, for instance, or to attain a high-stakes reward or incentive. To avoid this trap, transit leaders should transform their relationship with change and uncertainty by building adaptability as an evergreen skill?that benefits themselves and their transit systems at a deeper level.?Developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture is not a natural skill—even for the most successful among us—transit leaders can nurture it. And the rewards are worth the effort: companies with strong cultures that emphasize adaptability turn in better financial performance than entities that lack those attributes, research shows.

The power of resilience has been amply demonstrated during the COVID-19 crisis by different organizations. Although resilience and adaptability are linked, they are different in significant ways. Resilience often entails responding well to an external event, while adaptability moves us from enduring a challenge to thriving beyond it. We do not just "bounce back" from tricky situations—we "bounce forward" into new realms, learning to be more adaptable as our circumstances evolve and change.

Learning agility, emotional flexibility, and openness to experience are part of a multidimensional understanding of adaptability. These things help transit leaders?maintain deliberate calm under pressure?and display curiosity amid change. They allow leaders to respond in ways that are the opposite of an unthinking reaction by making thoughtful choices. In the workplace,?higher levels of adaptability are associated with greater levels of learning ability and better performance, confidence, and creative output.?Adaptability is also crucial for psychological and physical well-being and is linked to higher levels of social support and overall life satisfaction. McKinsey & Company offer five ways leaders can invest in it to prepare for a fast-paced and uncertain future:

?·????????Step 1: Practice well-being as a foundational skill

·????????Step 2: Make purpose your North Star and define your ‘non-negotiables’

·????????Step 3: Experience the world through an adaptability lens

·????????Step 4: Build deeper and more diverse connections

·????????Step 5: Make it safe to learn

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Transit Safety Culture: Listening to your Workforce: It Builds Trust

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The COVID-19 pandemic is, first and foremost, a human tragedy that has played out across the globe. Employees are experiencing unprecedented levels of disruption in their homes and communities, as well as in their jobs. If there is an unseen benefit in all of this, it is the fact that transit leaders must begin stepping up in the critical areas of the transit core value. Transit system leaders’ responses must have a tangible impact on employees. While those results do not offset the tremendous uncertainty and anxiety that many employees continue to feel, they point to a distinct sense of confidence and trust in their transit systems and leaders. These things run contrary to the idea that employees, as a group, are reacting to the current crisis with a fight-or-flight response. An emerging scientific viewpoint is that during times of great uncertainty, the natural human tendency is a "flight and affiliation" response toward individuals and situations that feel safe and familiar.

Trust must begin with the right mindset. Leadership can earn trust by showing commitment through their willingness to make a financial, personal, and emotional investment in their employees' well-being. Leadership can also build trust by making small promises and delivering on them, preferably soon after being made, particularly concerning an employee's personal life. Trust-building takes different paths, different amounts of time, and other sets of criteria (Javidan and Zaheer (2019).

When workplace trust is intact, it can sustain the employees and leadership dynamic work well and sustain a safety culture. When the trust is violated, the employee-manager relationship will suffer. Credibility is one of the critical characteristics of a manager that can build trust with employees. Employees rely on managers for accurate information regarding important topics such as pay, the delegation of job duties, promotions, benefits, and other related concerns. Accurate and timely communication helps to develop credibility for the managers in the eyes of the employees. Misinformation destroys that credibility, and the bond of trust are broken. When employees no longer trust management, it will create a toxic and weak safety culture. How do transit leaders, managers, and human resources professionals build trust across transit systems' culture and multiple sub-cultures? They must commit to the development and implementation of a sustainable safety culture.

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Trust is also the cornerstone behind all great teams. Trust is directly tied to leadership in any organization. However, to garner this trust in a transit environment, transit leaders must work hard to break down the carefully constructed walls and barriers that currently exist, which are many to include a lack of healthy engagement, lack of substantial diversity and inclusion programs, lack of vital education, training, and development.

The employee-manager relationship is another primary component of building trust and engaging workers in improving their skills and abilities. One of the critical elements of a successful employee-manager relationship is trust. When trust is vital between an employee and manager, it adds efficiency to other elements of workplace productivity.

By being readily available and helping employees give meaning to a crisis ("sense-making"), transit leaders can build employee resilience and social capital with their system. Moreover, they can help connect employees to the transit system and one another and can help enhance social connection and affiliation—not just formally but also by allowing informal and organic conversations to emerge.

?Transit Safety Culture: Workforce Effectiveness and Well-Being

?McKinsey & Company noted that many organizations had done well to immediately address employees’ safety and stability concerns. But a total return requires transit system-wide commitment to a broader range of needs and the strongest core values of work experience, effectiveness, and wellness. For decades, need-based theories of motivation have emphasized the importance of need fulfillment on employee motivation and behavior. Applied to employee experience management, transit system leaders should seek to address the most critical, prominent needs of the broader workforce while taking stock of different segments and individuals' unique needs. McKinsey & Company research found a strong correspondence between employees' stated needs and the underlying Company's engagement, well-being, and work effectiveness.

Transit leaders should invest in improving employee relationships. While leaders may naturally focus inward on the business itself, our survey results show that sustaining trust and acknowledging employee efforts are critical to employee engagement, well-being, and effectiveness. Organizations building social capital during earlier phases of the crisis will be in better positions than others as the workforce transitions to the return phase.

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Transit leaders should create and maintain a culture that values inclusion, individuality, and social harmony. As working methods shifted dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic, many frontline transit workers had to transition to new work duties, processes, and modes of communication and collaboration. McKinsey & Company research shows that having a foundation of involvement, fairness, respect, and equality can help employees adapt to new ways of working and interacting. As we face a future of vastly different working models and team structures, building such an integrated sustainable culture now will only benefit transit systems in the future.

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Transit leaders should Create a network of teams around each core value.?Transit leaders can set up a network of teams to promote cross-functional collaboration and transparency.?The team structure can quickly tackle?the transit system’s most pressing problems while enhancing the strength of random connections across the network for effective team building. Transit leaders should cultivate inclusion and psychological safety. Transit leaders and managers can help create inclusive and psychologically safe team environments by modeling behaviors that value all members' inputs, encouraging members to experiment without fear of negative consequences.

Finally, transit leaders should connect transit employees to something bigger than themselves and help them contribute. The emergence of?purpose as a driving force?is particularly compelling, given its overarching impact on all aspects of work and transit system service delivery. A sense of purpose can help employees navigate important levels of uncertainty and change and ensure that their efforts are aligned with the highest-value activities.

Transit Safety Culture: Transit Purpose

Post COVID-19, many organizations are shifting to a purpose-driven strategy, which can be an effective north star in helping guide their employees. But the purpose is only valuable when it is real, like developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture verse saying safety is our number one priority. So how do you ensure your purpose is more than a tagline? As the purpose movement goes mainstream, like the multiple disparities displayed during the pandemic, the pressure for transit systems to deliver on their purpose is high. An effective transit industry purpose acts as the strategic north star for the transit industry. It defines how you make a difference to your passengers, employees, and the community. Yet too often, purpose gets slapped onto a T-shirt and relegated to HR or social responsibility teams and fails to deliver the financial and social returns that?copious amounts of research?have shown is possible (McLeod, 2020).

The first metric is to have a clearly stated purpose. The transit industry has metrics for the number of passengers transported, number of miles operated, the number of vehicles placed into revenue operations daily, limited customer and employees, satisfaction survey, and other vital areas. Purpose requires a similar focus. Those transit leaders who are serious about addressing purpose need to?add qualitative indicators?to measure purpose progress instead of relying solely on the old traditional, more lagging quantitative metrics such as the ones cited.. Once transit leaders establish clarity of purpose, they can identify metrics specific to your aspiration (McLeod, 2020).

McKinsey & Company cites, research showed that respondents who indicate they are “living their purpose” at work are much more likely than those not doing so to sustain or improve their levels of work effectiveness, and they had four times higher engagement and five times higher well-being. Moreover, McKinsey & Company discovered that this experience element showed the most significant potential for improvement: only one-third of respondents believe their organizations strongly connect actions to purpose.

Transit leaders can create potentials to ensure an intense sense of purpose include the following actions: Embed purpose in how you talk to employees.?There are avenues for organizations?to move from the “why” to the “how”?in establishing and linking employees to a clear purpose. Transit leaders should connect the transit system’s “why” to their employee communications. As transit leaders change how the procedure operates through the crisis, consistently link the changes back to transit purpose. Develop the appropriate learning-centric culture through training that addresses lessons learned during the crisis.

Transit leaders can bring purpose to life by sharing stories (through video or town halls) of colleagues who embody purpose through the period of crisis. Now is the time to celebrate and create role models for those who are living their purpose. Transit leaders can start a longer-term conversation about meaning. Begin the demanding work of defining or revisiting the transit system’s purpose now. Explain how employees will play a critical role.

Summary

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Across the transit industry, working conditions throughout the pandemic have been incredibly stressful, regardless of whether transit workers are remote or in person. Survey polls found that workers’ life evaluations dropped over the past year. Despite the volatility, complexities, uncertainties, and ambiguities of Coronavirus COVID-19, and even though thousands of transit workers contracted the virus and hundreds died, transit leaders are not moving forward with strategies in the direction of a sustainable safety culture. Transit leaders do not see the urgency that is very much needed in the transit industry.

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Transit frontline employees need leaders they can trust, and it will take a lot for employees to trust transit leaders based on their experience from the pandemic. Transit leaders can build trust by making clear the transit core values and making sure they live up to the core values. Transit leaders can treat frontline employees and their work with respect, dignity, and humility. Transit leaders must act now! Transit leaders must determine when to be vulnerable and open and be authentic. But, most of all, transit leaders must now develop and implement a sustainable transit safety culture.

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Transit employees can be motivated by what is meaningful to them, like purpose. Purpose not only bolsters well-being and engagement, but it can also encourage transit employees to embrace and catalyze change. Transit system leaders can improve employee experience during the return phase of the COVID-19 crisis by shifting to a focus on meeting employees' health, and safety needs to a more nuanced approach that recognizes differences among the workforces. Employee experience drivers—perspectives and needs that vary between and even within those segments—may be heightened and more fluid right now, given the constantly shifting landscape. But transit system leaders that set a course focused on employee experience will create meaningful impact now and well into the future.

?When transit leaders realize that the single biggest challenge they face is the ability to adapt fast enough to match the increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity around them, and since all indications are the increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity rapid change are the new normal, transit system leaders will need to find new ways to mobilize their employees to actively participate in gathering insights, creating solutions, and providing leadership. Transit leaders must move from ambiguity to agility, or the transit industry will never adapt to the disruptive changes—transit systems will continue to thrive in it.

Developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture in the transit industry is an opportunity that transit leaders can lean into immediately. Transit leaders, you can no longer drive changes through a burning platform—using the crisis as a tipping point for change, or the old top-down approach. This fear-driven approach may encourage some initial actions, but it will shut down the ability to thrive. A burning platform may work in some situations, but it will not work where innovative ideas or new ways of working are critical to success. Transit leaders can no longer ignore this employee mandate. They want more. They deserve more. They will not stop until they get the justice they seek.

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