People and organisational effectiveness

A new change programme

We have recently embarked on a culture change programme that will transform British Airways into an organisation where innovation, growth and clear customer focus are the defining qualities.

The programme has five main themes:

Colleagues – engaging our people to make British Airways a high performance workplace;
Customers – focusing all our people to deliver consistent customer service;
Partnerships – developing and maintaining world-class partnerships with all key stakeholders, both internal and external;
Performance – creating a performance-based culture; and
Operational efficiency – driving continuous improvement, short and long-term.

This work, led by the Leadership team, involves and engages employees right across our business.

Training

We delivered 235,000 days of training during the year, including 30,000 training days to staff at Heathrow to support our move to Terminal 5.

We have invested significantly in the development of our customer service training portfolio and have developed a programme for those working in our Club and First cabins. Developed as part of a brands refreshment exercise, the programme aims to make sure cabin crew deliver the highest standards of service to our customers.

Over the past year, some 3,100 people have joined our Company. This has required a high level of induction training. We have refreshed our new entrant training programmes to make sure they reflect the priorities in our business plan.

External accreditation of our training programmes

Following the government review of vocational education, led by Lord Leitch, we have explored how we can invest more effectively in the development of our employees to build both their skills and educational standards. We have become the first national airline recognised as a training centre by the City & Guilds and, from February 2008, all new entrant cabin crew will achieve an NVQ Level 2 qualification on completion of their training. It is envisaged that further internal training programmes will become accredited and that employees undertaking courses will achieve nationally recognised qualifications.

Colleague involvement

Employee involvement continued to be a key focus during the year. Employees are asked to give their views and opinions on a wide range of topics every year via the Speak Up! opinion survey, administered by Ipsos MORI. The results from the survey are communicated widely and all departments are required to produce action plans to address areas of concern.

Results from the last survey showed significant improvements over the 12-month period in the perception of the effectiveness of line managers. However, despite these positive trends, the overall response rate to the survey – at just 35 per cent – was low. Employees expressed concerns about our ability to provide excellent customer service, reflecting some of the difficulties over the summer caused by increased security arrangements at UK airports.

One of our main aims this year is to increase the number of people responding to the survey. We also want to speed up our action planning and, in support of the corporate change programme, identify issues that would improve our perception of British Airways as a ‘great place to work’.

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