Delta Air Survived 9/11 by Involving Employees

A large number of studies show that company performance improves as employee involvement in decision-making goes up. But detailed case studies are rare, so an economics professor spent six years observing operations and conducting interviews at Delta Air Lines. Delta included employees in decision-making at all levels of the company.

The Delta Board Council, a formal team with a mission statement and bylaws that was made up of employees "peer-selected through a multi-step interview process…" had five jobs:

1. "Give top executives a candid, unfiltered report on the 'pulse of the company' from the front line" and help communicate top-level changes back to line workers.
2. "Represent the interests and perspective of employees to top management."
3. Serve as a "consultant to management," providing input on program or policy changes that could affect employees and on messages to employees. Members attend top management and board meetings for this purpose.
4. "Work on special projects," such as partnering with the management team in developing a new annual compensation review process.
5. "Conduct 1-2 day site visits at Delta facilities…getting feedback on the state of operations and employee relations."

Division and Base Employee councils included corporate-wide function-based groups and employee groups at the regional or local levels. These, too, were peer-selected and proposed solutions to on-the-job issues independently of (but with regular input from) management.

The program was costly, given the demand on management and employee time, infrastructure costs, and training needs. "It is naive to think that front-line employees can suddenly understand balance sheets, have the social graces to interact with executives and board members, or know how to write up a business case," the author wrote, and managers too needed new skills.

But the program helped:

• Energize the Employees—"a successful EI (Employee Involvement) model…unleashes a wave of energy that propels the company forward."
• Organizational Alignment/Coordination—EI in company operations improves the odds that "everyone pulls in the same direction" and helps solve front-line coordination problems quickly by empowering front-line workers to solve them.
• Production Efficiency/Quality—Delta's results include a "one-third productivity advantage it reputedly enjoys in airplane maintenance."
• Communication/Information Flow—"A major benefit of the Delta EI program is that it gives executive decision-makers more accurate, real-time information on the internal state of the company." This gets around the usual filtering of information that happens because, as one Board Council member put it, "'Nobody wants to look bad, or pass on bad news.'"

Delta was one of the few major airlines that did not respond to the post-9/11 downturn by laying people off, instead creating a voluntary leave program with the councils. Other airlines avoided Delta's short-term losses, but each "also got…a demoralized, angry, and insecure workforce and a business operation that a year later had badly deteriorated," the author asserted. Source: Kaufman, B. (03), "High-Level Employee Involvement at Delta Air Lines," Human Resource Management 42(2):175.