Opinion | The Problem Behind Southwest’s Cancellation? Staffing.

Like Southwest Airlines, it has canceled more than 13,000 flights, leaving vacationers and their bags stranded across the country. When I was in business school, the company was virtually a must-have case study because of its legendary efficiency. The company announced on Tuesday that two-thirds of his scheduled flights would be canceled, essentially a system-wide hard reboot of him.

How did you get to this? If I had to pick just one factor (her one hole in the cheese), it would be staffing. That’s not the Southwest’s only problem, but it’s probably the only one that compounded all the others.

Washington Post view: Southwest puts investors before customers and employees

Southwest’s case study, operational efficiency and brand loyalty, was built on a foundation of human capital. Disgruntled, undertrained employees call in and can’t run a finely tuned productivity machine. You need a team that works well together and solves problems on the fly. Southwest has long been known for its strong corporate culture. As Gary Leff of the essential View From the Wing blog told me, “From Southwest Airlines’ gate to his agents to flight attendants, the people on the front lines are usually their own, as opposed to other airlines.” You seem to like the work of

Companies that excel at getting the most out of their employees may be underinvesting in other aspects of their business. This is because employees can be relied on to fix system flaws. (A corollary to Reason’s Swiss cheese model is that you can make the wrong decisions for quite some time before they catch up with you.) If there’s a hole in the workforce itself, that’s a problem. There is a possibility. And some big ones have opened in the Southwest during the pandemic.

In February 2020, the airline employed 62,436 people. After 18 months, that number has dropped to 54,512. Since then it has recovered. According to the latest data, the number of employees exceeds 66,000. But Leff pointed out that nearly a fifth of those people have joined the company within the past year. Integrating a workforce shift of this magnitude takes time, especially for a complex operation like an airline.

This is not unique to Southwest Airlines. Many airlines cut salaries as air traffic plummeted and now have to rebuild. But it may have been more important to Southwest, as other characteristics of the company’s operations posed their own challenges. Despite the particularly short turnaround times to get the most out of the company’s fleet in normal times, there is little buffer for extended delays. And a very outdated system for assigning crew members that seems to have required a lot of manual tweaking.

Then the holes began to line up one by one. Holiday travel boom. Severe weather delaying operations at multiple airports. Numerous respiratory viruses are prevalent in the workforce. All of that put pressure on the system, apparently becoming almost unbearable when the company threatened to fire a Denver ground crew who called in sick without a note from a doctor who saw them by December 21st. I was. According to the note, telemedicine visits do not count.

Eventually something broke, then everything broke, especially the crew assignment system. Employees had to call to find out where to go, but the phone lines just jammed and they couldn’t get through. According to LATAM Airlines Chief Commercial Officer Marty St. George, time spent on hold Federal Aviation Administration work hour limits — so flight attendants timed out trying to get their work schedules and had to take mandatory breaks before they could fly legally.

“There is a lot of institutional knowledge that has been lost during the pandemic,” Lev said. “The lack of experience and the lack of systems resulted in a perfect storm of bad weather, inadequate staff redundancy and sick calls. It all snowballed.”

Of course, there’s no way to run counterfactuals to see how the Southwest’s 2019 workforce fared in this crisis. Had they worked, I doubt they would have done better.

Also, I doubt there are other snowballs. Airlines aren’t the only ones cutting jobs during the pandemic. Fortunately, few industries see snowballs evolve into avalanches as quickly and dramatically as transportation. Unfortunately, regardless of where the snowball is headed next, it’s likely that you’ll only notice the snowball rolling around after it’s grown large enough to do significant damage.