Terry Prone: How managers should handle long queues to keep passengers happy 

A lesson emerging from the Daa controversy is that even a great spokesperson may not be enough to solve all problems

A reality that all customer-facing organisations need to grasp is that communication does not start with a great spokesperson but face-to-face with customers. Picture: Leah Farrell

It’s this coming Wednesday, not the weekend. Certainly not a bank holiday weekend. Dublin Airport will be grand. Won’t it?

I have to hope so because, midweek, I fly to Rome to deliver training courses. However, after the weekend, things are looking reasonably good. Fingers crossed because today is the most problematic.

The Daa hasn’t been replaced as the most criticised State-owned body, but any Geiger counter checking its radioactivity is clicking less frequently right now.

Which means it may be safe to praise someone from Daa. Someone like Graeme McQueen, the guy with the Scottish accent who provides data, responds calmly to even irrelevant questions, and doesn’t get shirty with questioners, even the ones wielding the “but surely?” query. That’s the one used when the interview is basically over but the presenter has to keep it on air for another two minutes. “But surely your shareholder will?... but surely this should have been foreseen?... but surely you have back-up to cover this eventuality?”

Exceptionally good

Mr McQueen is one of the exceptionally good corporate spokespeople, and it’s a select group. Irish Rail’s Barry Kenny is one. Conor Faughnan, late of the Automobile Association, is another. Large organisations providing a regular service to the public, which may or may not suffer the odd hiccup, have tended to have such spokespeople and to rely on them for frequent media appearances. 

That’s fine. However, having those spokespeople doesn’t remove the need to train operational heads — those who make the consequential decisions — to be ready and media-competent so they can take public responsibility when they need to.

One of the practical lessons emerging from the Daa controversy is that even a great spokesperson performing at their best may not be nearly enough to solve emerging problems. As other airports have shown in the last fortnight, not many people in international
aviation, coming to the pandemic’s end, precisely identified what would be the level of increased traffic. 

All credit to the Daa, when things went pear-shaped for it, it didn’t point that much at other airports, taking the blame for its own situation and saying sorry unconditionally. 

Daa chief executive Dalton Philips apologised and promised a firm purpose of amendment or, in management-speak, a ‘robust’ plan to prevent traveller queues reaching Balbriggan. Picture: PA

It’s dead easy to thump Dalton Philips for using the airline’s platinum service, but that’s just an irritating side issue. He did come out, apologise and promise a firm purpose of amendment, or, in management-speak, a ‘robust’ plan to prevent traveller queues reaching Balbriggan.

In this paper on Friday, Pat Fitzpatrick, in his Learner Dad column, told the story of his family’s experience in Amsterdam airport, trying to catch a flight to Cork. The queue they joined, despite arriving in plenty of time, “stretched halfway to Belgium", he said.

It also moved at a snail’s pace, which meant their flight took off without them, despite his wife, to Pat’s grateful shame, pulling the string that allows families with small children to do a bit of queue skipping. All of which was pretty dire. And then, he wrote, a simple, apparently trivial thing happened.

An airport employee appeared and started handing out biscuits. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my son so happy.

“He was living his best life at Departures 3 in Amsterdam airport.” Simple, but so relevant, those biscuits. 

The law of reciprocation immediately kicks in: Parents feel grateful, kids are thrilled by the powers-that-be giving them a treat. Even the smallest treat — such as those mints at the cash desk in American restaurants — have been found to cause an uptick in the mood and attitude of customers. 

The Dutch capitalised on a queue. It’s possible. Queues make great pictures and cause affront, but queues are also a great opportunity for corporate communication. 

Queues make great pictures and cause affront, but are also a great opportunity for corporate communication. Picture: PA

The Daa had to use mainstream and social media and did so professionally and well in the crisis. It may, however, have missed the opportunity to apply informed opportunism to those queues. It might have been useful if logistics, HR, and other managers had donned high-viz vests and walked alongside the queues, asking questions and apologising.

They would have got an earful of abuse, but the mere presence of managers pitching up and being physically present in a bad situation says something about their interpretation of accountability.

In addition, if they had done this the first dodgy day, it might have served as action research. This harks back to the principle of management by walking (or wandering) about, adduced by management guru Tom Peters, who did intensive study, decades ago, into successful companies and just what it is that makes them successful. 

Peters found that communication is key, and isn’t confined to formal meetings and briefings. The good managers in really good companies tended also to favour informal communication with more than their direct reports. 

They wandered around their building or plant, talking to employees at random, asking questions, and listening to the answers.

Of course, the Daa bosses had the data from the HR spreadsheets and that data convinced Mr Phillips, a smart guy, that it was fine for him to fly off to Saudi Arabia. Which he did, only to learn of the meltdown as he flew and wisely took the next flight back.

It is arguable though, that, had the Daa been doing management by walking about, it might have gleaned information that would have made the meltdown predictable and to some extent, preventable.

It would have witnessed the staff normally seen as the good guys (the ones who arrive with the wheelchairs) getting it in the neck as if they were responsible for the hassle. Partly because passengers who haven’t travelled for a while by air (like most of us) often think that you arrive in the airport and ask for a wheelchair, whereas you are supposed to book in advance.

So people denied wheelchairs were raging, but people who got wheelchairs were raging too, because they banked on the wheelchair being their queue-skipping device (serving like Ms Fitzpatrick’s children to give them a head start) and it wasn’t.

Everywhere within Dublin Airport, the day before the mega-meltdown, staff were being verbally trounced by passengers.

Now, here’s the post-pandemic reality that’s going to affect employers everywhere in the coming months. It’s called full employment. It’s called the ‘war for talent’. 

None of us knows how long it will last, but while it’s here, it changes things. It changes the willingness on the part of low-paid staff to turn up for a stressful job when there may be another job somewhere else where they don’t have to tolerate another day of abuse for something they didn’t cause.

Anecdotal evidence says that last weekend, some Daa employees didn’t leap from the scratcher, enthused by the prospect of airport chaos and being given out to by passengers. Managers on the floor, sharing the incoming and supporting the front-liners, might have helped to motivate them.

A reality all customer-facing organisations need to grasp in the changed employment situation is that communication doesn’t start with a great spokesman. It starts face-to-face with the front-liners and the customers.