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Chris Rayner, Swissport’s Chief People Officer discusses his business’ response after the pandemic and how a new recruitment strategy is helping them tackle peak travel season.
20 April 2023
Story by
Chris Rayner, Chief People Office, Swissport
The pandemic had a huge impact on working life across the aviation industry. Here, Chris Rayner, Swissport’s Chief People Officer discusses his business’ response after the event and how a new recruitment strategy is helping them tackle peak travel season.
As people returned to the skies post-pandemic last summer, the aviation industry faced operational challenges in many areas and all over the world. The rapid increase in travel demand, combined with a significant gap of trained and accredited staff, resulted in an overstretched system. Around the world, there were news reports on flight cancellations, queuing, delayed baggage, staff shortages and even major airports curbing capacity by restricting the number of flight movements.
The experience reiterated how important skilled people are to providing excellent service across the industry. At Swissport, we recognise that our people are our most valuable asset. Ahead of the 2023 peak travel season, we have introduced a refined recruitment, retention and training strategy with a number of measures all aimed at increasing our readiness and operational resilience. These include a higher share of qualified staff retained over the winter months and an even earlier recruitment start to fill some 5,000 new positions globally. We are confident that these measures will see us master the operational stress tests of the summer and avoid disruptions like many airports saw last year.
Looking back on 2022 and expectations for 2023
Summer months are always busy and can be testing a system even in normal times. The post-pandemic return in travel demand was positive, but almost violent in speed and volume. Aviation as a whole was overwhelmed. Labor shortages exacerbated the situation across an aviation industry which was just getting back on its feet. Even best prepared companies, including the world’s largest airlines, airports and aviation service companies, could not keep up with the volume and maintain the usual operational stability at all locations. The situation was compounded by instability in flight schedules. Despite all these challenges, our people came together to deliver the smooth and hassle-free travel airlines and travellers expect and are used to, but we appreciate some customers did not get the seamless experience they rightly expect. By the end of 2022 Swissport ground services had handled 3.3 million flights and served 186 million passengers, nearly double the number of travellers in 2021. We also handled 4.8 million tons of cargo in 2022, near the record 5.1 million tons of 2021.
Developing a game-changing recruitment and retention strategy
The number of travellers will continue to rise this year and that’s great news. 2023 has the potential to see international travel come close to pre-COVID levels, but likely with more extreme peaks. To be able to meet this demand we are reinvigorating our workforce with a refined recruitment, retention and upskilling strategy that includes the following three pillars:
- Ensure we have enough trained and badged staff
One of the challenges that aviation companies and in fact the entire global service industry has encountered last year – and which they continue to battle with – were staffing issues. We lost a lot of our experienced frontline workers during the pandemic. The fact that people who left the aviation industry during the Covid years did not return post-pandemic made recruitment that much harder and was a major cause of operational disruptions amid rising demand from travellers. Nobody expected this, but we have all learned that lesson. Slow process times to get people vetted and badged continues to be an issue, but we are working with authorities and governments in hot spot markets to get this under control.
We have launched a large-scale recruitment initiative with the creation of 5,000 new positions globally, including 1,200 in the UK and Ireland. This will help stabilize operations and increase our flexibility, especially during the peak travel periods of the summer.
- Investment in retention and training programs
Our Training Academy helps us boost and refresh peoples’ skills to ensure the workforce is trained and ready to provide high-quality services to our airline customers. We started this process by retaining and recruiting more people during the quieter months to allow for timely training and to ensure our workforce is ready with some reserves for the spring and summer. In the UK, for example we have already hired 92 per cent of the people we need for the summer months, compared with only 60 per cent at the same point last year.
- People development that focuses on the long term
As we are going to retain a bigger percentage of employees over winter than in past years, we are also using our talent management and people development process to match people with longer term roles.
We believe this can be achieved through matching our best talents’ skills and experiences with the positions and tasks most suited to them beyond today.
Developing and sustaining our inclusive workplace culture
We have an innately diverse workforce, with over 50,000 people in almost 300 locations worldwide. As such, we are constantly learning and are on a journey towards becoming an ever more inclusive employer, providing equal opportunities in an environment that offers mutual respect for all.
We know how critical it is to understand individuals’ values and needs. The starting point to developing an Employee Value Proposition, we carried out interviews with people from all lines of our business and across all geographies to understand the activities and atmosphere they are looking for at work. If we’re to increase retention, we need to understand what drives people to excel and how we can secure their success and growth in the company. The condensed output from our qualitative interviews resulted in the formulation of an Employee Value Proposition and three core values that include “Show you care”, ”Do the right things” and “Win as a Team”. We are now working on a comprehensive plan to enhance our employee value proposition, bringing to life the promise we make to our people. This includes very concrete measures like 28-day rosters, enabling our people to better plan their private lives, or simple things like attractive break rooms.
Of course, employee satisfaction and success are significantly driven by soft factors, too. Among these the leadership style, the corporate culture, corporate conduct, the feedback culture, appraisal processes and the compensation policy, to name just a few. Having a trusting, enjoyable relationship with employees is what every sustainable workplace should be working towards. The goal of this is not only to continue building an inclusive workplace for our people to grow, but also to strengthen our ability to adapt and react to change quickly. It’s an exciting journey we are on at Swissport.
