The world has started to open up and airlines are poised to put more metal in the air looking to make up revenue and stymie losses in the post-pandemic way of business as confidence builds from the travelling public.
Maxed-out flight schedules and bulging airport terminals, especially during the past few holiday cycles, had put airline staffing, adequately trained airline staffing, to the test of reinvigorated airline operations.
With most of the pandemic restrictions in the rearview mirror, negative safety trends on the horizon have appeared in the world of aviation as we take a look into this post-pandemic workforce and how we got to this point of concern.
In late 2020 and into 2021 a new “generation” of airline employees entered the workforce, presenting new demographics which led to a shift in hiring philosophies within the aviation communities.
The hiring challenges that airlines and airline service providers faced globally led to a shift in qualifications, adjustments to training programs, and the resetting of many of the historical baselines.
Some important areas that this had a direct effect on are training and oversight, employee seniority, and behavioural mentorship (peer-to-peer guidance); these elements have had a direct effect on recent hiring trends and their relationship to safety performance in airport operations.
Training has become more asynchronous. Employee seniority has declined. Many senior aviation professionals “opted out” or took generous buy-out packages as airlines scrambled to restructure amid unpredictable costs, and cash hemorrhaging during the pandemic.
The combination of these post-pandemic consequences has developed into an irreversible shift in staffing dynamics; a more seasoned workforce provided senior behavioral mentorship in peer-to-peer guidance; the longer-tenured employee piece of peer-to-peer mentoring may now be absent.
Pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic performance trend assessments of airline workers on employee injuries and aircraft damages will show increases in both metrics starting as we exited the global covid restrictions when “return to normal” global initiatives were implemented and started to take effect.
Rise in accidents & injuries
It’s not just a global ground operations and service provider issue either. Human factor elements such as failure to follow established procedures from inexperienced maintenance technicians; and inadequate cabin door operation training for new inflight and flight crews have contributed to an increase in accidental aircraft slide deployments post-covid pandemic and at its highest frequency in years.
Injuries caused by unfamiliarity with equipment, fatigue, and poor ergonomics are all too common now with data showing that a large percentage of injuries occur in the zero to one year of tenure employee. This past year, unfortunately, there were even fatalities on the ramp that were avoidable.
Poor ergonomic programmes, the absence of pre-employment physical ability screening, and a lack of people returning to work in tandem with a light-duty programme were pre-cursors to skyrocketing employee fatigue and on-the-job injuries post-pandemic.
Pre-employment ability screening, prevention programmes, and assisting injured employees back to work, help with educating employees on how to improve their operational conduct but also understand the consequences of filing fraudulent injury claims.
Looking at the possible causes of what is causing the safety performance concerns from an inexperienced workforce, training, and oversight is most often the first area that is “restructured” during cost-saving initiatives and can be the catalyst for the beginnings of poor safety performance in the operation. Global staffing shortages for airlines and airline service providers have extended into many training departments in the form of a lack of experienced instructors conducting training and station trainers performing local on-the-job training.
Employees now face reduced on-the-job training curriculum, reduced skills observations, and reduced hands-on time with ground service equipment and jet bridges. Many employees that have historically been responsible for the mentoring and training of new employees once in the operation are now part of an “all hands on deck” approach to support the staffing challenges of the operation.
Poor mentorship
How have declining employee seniority and lack of positive behavioural mentorship contributed to the safety concerns for an inexperienced workforce? The post-pandemic aviation industry workforce showed a decline in seniority as many longer-tenured employees accepted buy-outs or transfers during the global pandemic. Many of the remaining employees now have limited experience due to reduced training and hands-on experience with ground service equipment under the guidance of more seasoned employees.
With a lack of experienced employees in the operation, there are reduced positive behavioural modelling opportunities from more senior employees; vanishing tenured assets are being replaced with employees having less than one year of experience responsible for positive employee grooming which in many cases takes years. Airlines and airline service companies have seen the highest influx of new employees contributing to an employee demographic of the least experienced workforce in decades to manage.
Preferred shift and assignment bidding by senior employees, limits all-hours coverage by these more experienced, longer-tenured employees, which can lead to less exposure, and pairing with recent new hire employees. Less shift and assignment bidding options for new hires provide fewer cross-experience pairings between short and longer-tenured employees.
While “mass hiring” events may satisfy, immediate staffing numbers, in reality, mass hiring can challenge the coordination and coverage of scarce training management resources who are attempting to complete on-the-job training and initial employee orientation at the station. Speaking of training, how about that pre-Covid new hire training curriculum? Is it still sufficient for the new demographic? Newly updated modules may be necessary; a larger learning curve may be considered to avoid high turnover and investment loss.
Keeping the focus on strengths and skills, realignment can adjust focus to a continual review and refresh of shift and task bidding processes with more emphasis on experienced employee coverage. Airlines and airline service providers need to focus on training better and training more often to build confident employee skills.
It is up to all of us to mitigate damages by applying lessons learned, reinforcing respect and adherence to process and policy, preserving talent supply resources within the organisation, and encouraging good safe behaviour. By keeping these important areas under control, and through the continual analysis of the performance trends from an inexperienced workforce, we can reduce the impact on safety that the pandemic had within our aviation communities.
