United union now surveying flight attendants weekly! (Surprises here)

I looked into this new employee survey in some detail and what I found was interesting overall, and surprising in some ways. I feel that all commentary I have seen so far may not be on the correct track. In short, this survey is designed to support existing union positions and management can safely ignore it. More importantly, I believe a far better approach to understanding and improving employee retention would be reasonably easy for United and the union to agree upon and implement.

Here are the facts so far:

The Association of Flight Attendants is the union that represents all United cabin staff. On July 29th, they announced they were implementing the Flight Attendant Promoter Score based on an optional weekly survey of all cabin staff. The first result was posted on August 5th and the score was -95. This attracted quite a number of headlines, as you would expect.

First, here is what it is not

This is neither the classical employee NPS score, nor the more modern Net Promoter for People. Had they used it, eNPS would have been calculated from the answer to ‘How likely are you to recommend United as a place work for cabin crew?’ or something very similar.

Now, here is what it is

Given its initiators, it is clear to me that its purpose is to prove that flight attendants are unhappy. Since the survey does not ask about suggestions for action, that is not the purpose. It is simply a tool, a metric, to support pre-existing grievances.

The AFA survey itself uses five questions, all rated from 0 to 10. There is no open question or any other way of gathering specific improvement suggestions. They simply state “We are asking United Flight Attendants for your feedback on how current management is doing in a number of areas that impact our Flight Attendant experience.”

Here are the questions:

1. I feel my contributions to our airline are valued
2. I am able to trade my pairings/Reserve days with open time/pool
3. I feel supported by management
4. My contact with crew scheduling is timely and my issues are resolved
5. Management is responsive to my needs during irregular operations

And this diagram is used to guide respondents on how to use the rating scales:

First results

In the first iteration, 96% of respondents gave scores from zero to six on average across the five questions, and just 1% gave a nine or ten. This therefore gave an FPS result of -95, using classical NPS calculation methodology. I have not been able to find any information about what proportion of the flight attendants responded.

Personally, I have lots of experience working in unionized environments. I think I can say with some confidence that employees mainly talk to their union reps when they are unhappy. When they are happy, there is silence in that direction. I therefore believe the survey result is highly biased. I will of course change my view if I learn that it has a 40%+ response rate.

Does a number in an Inc. article contradict the FPS result?

Bill Murphy wrote a lead article on this for Inc. In it, he made the following statement:

“United also told me that a recent referral-only job posting for flight attendants generated 2,700 recommendations in three days.”

Bill sees this as paradoxical, essentially asking why they would do so if they don't like the company, and seems to suggest this means the survey result may be invalid. I don't see it as paradoxical, for two reasons. First, current airline employee unhappiness is mainly caused by understaffing, in turn caused by Covid-related layoffs that have not yet been completely reversed. Second, there is an employee referral bonus system at United. I have not been able to find out its precise value, but it seems that if a referred person completes their trial period the person who referred them gets a benefit worth about $300.

So what would a better approach look like?

Flight attendant satisfaction and engagement trends can easily be tracked using a number of operational metrics. In the United version of this, the absolute values of the metrics do not matter as much as the trends. I suggest that leadership of both the company and the union should agree the KPIs. If the top-level goal is to reduce employee turnover, then all possible sources of employee data should be analyzed to understand which seem to be the best predictors of employees leaving the company.

There could be surprises. Perhaps there is lower turnover when people do more short-haul flights, as they may be away from home overnight less often. Perhaps average hours worked per week is the strongest predictor. Maybe the KPIs are different by gender, age, relationship status, and whether the flight attendant has children. Does employee use of the free / low-cost standby flight benefit have any predictive value? How about years of service or pay?

In short, there are much better ways of identifying the issues and their relative importance than the current survey. It really seems like a waste of time to me.

Notes

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Maurice FitzGerald is a retired VP of Customer Experience for HP's $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, and a fourth book that focuses on Peter's cartoon illustrations for the first three. All are available from Amazon.

The author can be reached here on LinkedIn or [email protected]. Please let me know what you think and what sort of content you would like to see here.