THE HIGH PRICE OF INEFFICIENT TRAINING
Background: The three major U.S. carriers (Delta, United and American) operating in Brazil are responsible for a sizeable volume of the passenger traffic between the United States and Brazil. Brazil is also one of the largest transit hubs in South America for passengers.
Airlines are responsible for ensuring that passengers from all over the world have the correct documents in order to properly travel to the United States. Failure to do so can result in fines of up to $25,000 per occurrence in addition to the associated costs of the return flight for the passenger. Complicating matters are strict Brazilian laws regarding compensation for passengers who were denied boarding improperly. Simply put, if the airline improperly boards a passenger or erroneously denies boarding to a passenger, there are severe financial costs.
Even one incorrectly boarded passenger can dramatically reduce the profitability on a flight.
Issue: The U.S. carriers were facing a challenge. During a 12-month period the number of incidents involving a passenger either incorrectly boarded or erroneously denied boarding had significantly increased.
Our team was engaged to come in and examine the current training programs and if necessary design and implement a new curriculum.
Insight: Before examining the curriculum, our team wanted to gain a better understanding of the airline employees. Our belief is that training cannot occur in a vacuum, and in order to optimize training you have to design it with the end-user in mind from the beginning.
Based on conversations with over 100 Brazilian employees across the different airlines, our team developed a thesis for the inability of the current curriculum to meet the needs of the employees. The training curriculum was designed with a U.S.-centric educational view to account for every possible situation the airline employees would encounter. The end result was information overload.
The original training was designed for a six-hour block, which was simply too long and the information was too packed. The curriculum also did not allow time for group discussion, which is key for Brazilian audiences. Our team's understanding of Brazilian cultural and educational norms as well as our previous experience led us to conclude that we needed a radical shift in strategy.
Our team's insight was as follows, the airline's effort to prepare their employees for every eventuality had the opposite effect: they simply froze trying to remember all the rules and regulations. Rather than inundate the employees solely with rules, we needed to design a process that was simple and could help them triage their cases.
Strategy: Our team's insight allowed us to then turn to the curriculum with fresh eyes and the first thing we targeted was the time. Six-hours was too long and too inefficient. Based on our analysis and data the optimal training delivery would be a two-hour block divided up as follows:
Three 20-minute blocks of instruction about U.S. visas, U.S. passports and U.S. permanent resident cards (green cards).
40 minutes for group discussion and questions that could be applied throughout.
20 minutes of break.
Beyond the time, we switched the instructional delivery method from English to Portuguese. Our team had found that although the employees spoke English, the variance in the employees' ability was too wide, and the impact would be optimized if delivered in Portuguese.
Finally we made a concerted effort to redesign the training in order to move away from mere rule memorization towards understanding systems and processes. This would allow employees to have a template regardless of what situation they encountered rather than hope that they remembered some rule or exception. This portion of our work is proprietary.
Then our team began the delivery over the course of one week. Based on the engagement we observed with the employees, we were confident that our redesigned training would have the impact it needed.
Outcome: The results from our team's redesigned training were as follows:
In the six-month period following our training (Summer 2017), the airlines reported no chargeable errors were made in boarding. (Note: The U.S. Government reserves the right to refuse entry to certain passengers even if they possess valid travel documents, penalties are not assessed against the airlines for these occurrences).
The airline supervisors and executives reported to us that employees reported high levels of understanding and comfort with the source material. Additionally, according to the airlines, their employees demonstrated higher degrees of mastery and lower levels of stress in this area.
The employees themselves reached back out and thanked us for making their jobs far less stressful.