How do you communicate with a dispersed critical work group in a pandemic? Clearly not something that you learn in business school…
Three years ago, in March 2020, I finished a long planned vacation. Believe it or not, as Covid was sweeping the world, my husband and I were on a cruise ship. We were able to join the crossing of the first ship of the Virgin Voyages fleet from Liverpool to New York to launch the brand new cruise line. Well, we never got to New York, the ship turned south, dropped us off in Miami and went back out to sea for what was thought to be a few weeks to let this virus settle down. Well, we all know how things played out as a few weeks became a few months and even years and our world as we knew it changed like we had never seen before.
We flew back up to New York that morning on a JetBlue flight from Fort Lauderdale and it was a bit surreal. A weekend in that airport in March would have been peak of the peak for cruise customers coming and going…but something was happening. We just didn’t know quite what. I chatted with our JetBlue Supervisor, Carol, that Sunday morning - our big decision that day was whether our Inflight Crewmembers would be able to wear gloves throughout service onboard so they did not have to grab service items directly from our Customers. We truly had no idea how much was going to change, and how fast. Monday morning back in the office we all realized things were happening out there - but no one really had any idea just how much was about to unfold. By the end of that week, or maybe it was early the following week - New York politicians were moving towards a stay at home requirement for any employees whose role did not absolutely require them to come into an office. I remember every day that week on the Metro North train and the subway there were fewer and fewer commuters - it felt abandoned by the end of that week. It was early the week of March 15 that our JetBlue leadership looked at how we could morph into a remote leadership workforce.
Now I have to say, at JetBlue, in the Support Center, our teams had some self administered flexibility to work from home on Fridays. I struggled with it - I was maybe old school and really valued the connections within our team and across the organization. And I knew that the truly critical roles in our part of the organization - those Crewmembers who safely delivered our Customer experience every day (as well as their their leaders) did not have that flexibility….they always had to be in the operation, and that was not going to change. My worry was - how were we going to stay connected? I had worked hard since joining the organization to be sure to get to each of our 5 focus cities at least once a quarter for a visit, a bit of a town hall to connect both formally and informally. However, within a week or so it became evident that our in person method of staying connected with a very geographically dispersed employee base was not going cut it.
I remember it was around March 17 I asked our two Directors and our communications team of Paula and Shavely to come hang out in my office that afternoon so we could figure out how to stay connected with our In-flight Crewmembers..and there were close to 5,500 of them. We were thinking this ‘thing’ was going to last a few weeks at most…little did we know. Things were happening so fast, and more drastically than we had ever seen. Front line Inflight Crew at any airline would go weeks or even longer with out seeing their leader. They do an amazing job and report right to the gate - their schedules are delivered through their iPad. They get updates to any regulatory or service changes through their iPad - and would seek out a Leader if they had a challenge or needed support…but it was, and still is, not like any other work group I had ever led.
How were we going to connect - yes wear gloves for service, wear them optionally the whole flight, then it was mandatory, face masks became optional for crew, then mandatory, then mandatory for Customers, service changed - for Mint we went to pre-packaged wrapped sandwiches instead of our award winning bespoke menues, wine went to plastic disposable cups (yuck), no more of our free unlimited snacks in core - we had our catering partners pre-package a snack or two in a plastic bag vs customers reaching in to our snack baskets, baskets became a container for disposable wipes, we were disinfecting airplanes regularly, we then blocked every middle seat to provide social distancing, then we undid that months later, we had to communicate any details of crewmembers who came down with the virus to the rest of the crew….it was non-stop When we were in my office that afternoon in March - we had NO idea any of this was coming…all I knew is that our usual way of getting any sort of messaging out had to change.
Our solution was to create a Message From Ed - it was important that it stayed at one page and it had to be only value add information. It could be a paragraph, or a full page…never more than one page. And as we put out our first one we decided, sort of last minute, to number them. That way, as things evolved, our Crew would know that something that asked them to do in message 5 could change a few days later - so always go by the most recent message. Those messages went out 7 nights a week at first - yes, things were changing that fast! As the months went on, we moved to 5 nights and then 3 nights. We created a unique banner so in the midst of a bunch of other communications, our Crew could always find the Message From Ed. As we moved through the year and into early 2021 (with messages about international travel for Crew and Customers, vaccine availability and more) we kept it up - I wound up sending out 279 Messages from Ed. As I did start flying around for visits again ( I personally came back to the office on May 21, 2020 and was at JFK to see the team by the 4th of July 2020) I had dozens and dozens of Crewmembers who stopped me and thanked me. They told me they felt so connected and always knew were to turn for the latest updates. It was so fulfilling to know it added value. I did include my picture on the banner - I am not a leader who usually does something like that (humility is such a critical leadership value) but our comms team felt is was important to make this one more personal. We had so many new Crewmembers who had joined in early 2020 and into early 2021 and when I would fly around they all knew who I was from the simple picture. I would much rather have been able to continue our quarterly focus city visits - but wow, this sure did keep them all connected and informed.
I shared often as I was leading the team through the pandemic that our young leaders where learning more through that journey than they would ever have learned in any classroom setting. We all put so many new tools in our toolkit.
As I look back on the past 3 years, and think about this story in particular, one of my biggest takeaways is the importance of being completely flexible.
279 Messages from Ed - never would have thought I would have done something like that.