With consumers counting every penny, holidays abroad are being replaced by ‘staycations’ and trips to Morocco or Mallorca are becoming weekends in Margate. At the peak of the recession in 2010, UK airports suffered the biggest fall in passenger numbers since records began at the end of the second world war.
On the frontline at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport (JLA) – as Speke Airport was renamed in 2002 after the city’s most famous son – HR director Carol Dutton has seen first-hand the nation’s fluctuating travel habits. When she started at the airport as HR manager 13 years ago it had about 600 staff. Now the airport directly employs 234 staff, but is still one of the 10 busiest airports in the UK.
“We’ve gone through a lot of change,” says Dutton. “Airports struggle in the recession, and it’s bad particularly here as most of our traffic is through the low-cost airlines catering for long weekends. That’s what people cut back on.”
In her 13 years at JLA, it’s not just downsizing that Dutton has had to deal with, given the boom in low-cost airlines in the early 2000s. “We’ve had massive upsurges, and the opposite,” she recalls. “I’ve done everything from huge recruitment drives to redundancy programmes, plus TUPE-ing in and out various services.”
Three years ago, JLA was acquired by the Canadian airport group Vantage, bringing even more change. “We’ve just come out of a long period of making a lot of redundancies and making the organisation very lean,” says Dutton. “It has been a major challenge – it’s not nice in any business. Now it’s about trying to settle the workforce, saying ‘that’s it, we’ve made our changes, we’re efficient, we’re lean, let’s all calm down and start looking to the future’.”
After such a major change programme, you might expect engagement scores to be in the doldrums and absenteeism to be stratospheric, but Dutton proudly reveals that isn’t the case. The latest engagement score was 75%, up from 52% in 2008. Absenteeism used to hover around 16%, now it’s 2%.
And while Dutton admits JLA once had a “tricky” industrial relations landscape – her staff can be “quite militant at times” – the unions and management now work in partnership to resolve issues. “The relationship with the unions has been hard and it’s taken many years,” she says.
“Now we can have our disagreements but always come to a conclusion. It’s about listening and accepting that we are going to have different opinions, but there’s always a solution that suits us all because the one thing about working here that unites our staff is passion and pride.”
Dutton recently spent four weeks immersed in every role in the airport, asking staff for their opinions on what JLA’s new people strategy should look like and collecting answers for an employee attitude survey.
“We want people to know that we are going to start investing in them, and that I only want to write a people strategy that’s informed by the staff,” she says. “I’ve spoken to everyone, sat in the watch rooms, in the mess rooms, and asked what our people want us to do to make them feel happy, secure and proud.”
The overriding positive to come out of Dutton’s exercise was the pride employees feel about working for JLA: 89% said they were proud of the work they did. “People are very proud to come from Liverpool and work for Liverpool airport,” she says. “They won’t have it criticised publicly. We might have internal disagreements, but to the outside world we are a united front. We love our airport. Working here you get bitten by the bug. We don’t have that many people leave willingly.”
And that pride doesn’t end with retirement; Friends of Liverpool Airport is a group of retired employees who run free tours for children and write welcome letters to the CEOs of airlines that fly from JLA.
In terms of improvements, the survey highlighted a lack of development training. So Dutton is devising a management development programme and personal development plans for everyone. “We are going to have a ‘pick and mix’ menu of learning units and build it up into a more modern and proactive offering, with much more choice,” she says.
Staff also called for investment in equipment and the introduction of long-service awards. “It was amazing how strongly people felt about things you might not expect,” says Dutton. “With investing in training and equipment, it’s difficult because we haven’t got a lot of money, but people understand that. If we just show them the plans, they’ll come with us.
“Vantage couldn’t understand how passionate people got about their jobs. I came out [of the attitude survey project] buzzing because we’ve cracked the most difficult thing: the engagement is there. It’s just the bits around the edges we’ve got to put in place.”
After the strategy is endorsed by staff and then managers, Dutton will take it to the board, making it a truly bottom-up approach. At the end of the year, she will go back around the organisation, showing people the plans and proving the management team are taking action.
The passion employees at JLA have for their work is reflected in Dutton herself. She has worked in airports for 25 years and says she doesn’t know how she’d cope anywhere else. “There’s always something different, a massive buzz and never a chance to be bored,” she says.
