This 100 percent. GK spent 17 years running WN into a hole and spewing hate for all the front line employees. Change was needed, EM would not be my first choice but still a better choice than the bean counter.


At least this place is moving in the right direction now.

 

Well, BEBOP was another rancid hate generator... It's kind of a shame, I think having a tool like that was actually a great idea but they let cubical dwellers track process compliance instead of operational effects, and that completely wrecked the whole project. What worries me is that the horrible manager (not leader) who rammed that down everyone's throats forcing 100% compliance no matter what, is still on staff and he/she will do it again next time instead of handing the front line employees a new tool and standing back to see what they do with it.

I guarantee that if BEBOP hadn't been all about 100% compliance and our employees had the freedom to use their judgement on how to use and apply the info the tool gave them, it might have actually been a useful tool. As it was, it did nothing but generate stress and conflict because operational outcomes weren't even being tracked, just blind compliance with the new process. That's the stupidest way ever to create positive change in a highly trained and mostly highly motivated employee group, but they keep doing it. That guy, and the guy who last contract would rather re-route 10 pilots to avoid one premium trip award, needs to be fired because they're still causing far more damage than any other factor in our business.

 

This is the Southwest way. I totally agree with everything that you said there. They have taken away any and all authority from front line employees to make judgment calls.
This really happened tonight: a doctor on a BUR-LAS flight got a flight attendants attention because it appeared that the organ that he was flying to transplant into a live patient was sitting on the ramp and they had closed the door to depart. Captain gets ops to bring the jetbridge back but ops refuses to reopen the flight stating that he needs sup approval. Sup does not want to open the flight but does so after arguing with captain for 5 minutes. Flight is reopened. Organ gets on. The irony is that had the organ not been on, the surgeon would have had to get off, resulting in...you guessed it...reopening the flight. The final kicker was there was a 30 minute delay for ATC sector saturation anyway so the flight was departing late no matter what. The ops agent was clearly afraid to make the call. The sup was probably backing up the ops agent and being a complete moron. The captain rightfully stood his ground, but how many would have? I don't know the answer to that.

Metrics above all costs and leadership by intimidation are the hallmarks of failing organizations. That BS needs to be rooted out of this company.

 

ground ops have no consequences and they know it. A couple firings at the higher level would stop that.
Even during upgrade when you meet with all the directors of each branch they told us ahead of time to not waste our time with ground ops as it won't matter what we say.
Everyone knows they are a problem but no one dares go against them. Idk but they must know where the bodies are buried or something

 

Athe VP of ground ops who sent the threatening email during Covid just “resigned” effective immediately in early September…

 

good. Its a start but the behavior remains. I have not met an ops agent that hasnt complained about the bebop metric.
one even got in trouble because it said he needed 34 bags yet there wasn't enough to be checked since there was too few people and most of them already checked bags.
Its full on idiocracy and zero common sense.

 

Good riddance

 

Right? A guy like that surviving that self disgrace is exactly what was wrong with this company. He and his ilk are a cancer to be cut out. They had a chance to do it post meltdown and they passed and gave out bonuses instead. Heads should have rolled right after that meltdown, but instead it took years.

 

Right? I mean we blew $1b in 2 weeks during the meltdown. They could have fully funded our PS and instead cut it while giving themselves bonuses. I’ll never forgive them for that…you can’t say you lead by example and then crap all over your employees.

 

GBepop is already be phased out too…

do you get your company news by dial up? lol