May 02
Over at Signal Vs. Noise they’ve got an interesting little thing on airlines making small tweaks for huge impact, which reminded me of a story we heard from Southwest Airlines …
Collecting empty cups after a landing, flight attendant Rhonda Holley noticed Southwest’s logo printed on the plastic trash bag. Two things struck her - first, customers knew which airline they were on, and second, the trash bags were thrown away immediately. She wrote to Colleen Barrett, President of Southwest, to ask how much it cost to print logos on the trash bags. Her response? “Thanks - you’ve just saved us $300,000 a year. We’re not going to be printing logos on the trash bags anymore.”
Southwest often preach how it’s people are one of it’s greatest assets, and this comes from enabling their creativity ability through innovative practices. One such instance is the “Walk A Mile” program, where any employee can do someone else’s job for the day. Obviously in some instances this isn’t possible (can you imagine taking a flight with a “pilot for the day” introducing himself over the loudspeaker?) but for raising levels of co-operation, understanding and collaboration it’s proved invaluable, with 75% of Southwest’s 20,000 employees having taken part.
Cutting costs through top-down management strategies is all well and good, but when you empower your employees so they personally care about saving the company money, who knows where your next great idea will come from?
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This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Creativity, Culture, Innovation, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Comments to “Taking Out The Logo-Covered Trash”
How about a reusable canvas bag? I would venture a guess that most of the trash they collect is dry, ie. newspapers, wrappers, empty plastic cups (which should be recycled anyway). The attendant could carry smaller plastic bags for any egregious litter.
Wonderful how a small change can take the fast-track elevator up to the board room and immediately impact the bottom-line: from bottom to top and back. But what about the same effort being made top-down? My compliments to any organisation that allows employees to tell the board how things are done “down here” but what about organisations where the board comes down the elevator and explains what happens “up there”? And forget merely pressing the button to Ground Floor: a board that details their own understanding of how their top-line ideas will actually impact the day-to-day activities of, let’s say, a flight attendant? There are some fabulous clues in the South-West story that are true lessons for any organisation looking to spark innovative ideas and energy in their organisation: first of all, Rhonda felt empowered to write to Colleen. She was comfortable in stepping out of her job description and turn consultant for a day. Secondly, with 20,000 employees, there are 199,990 toes Rhonda could have stepped on - something that might have held back the average employee in any organisation. But with Southwest’s emphasis on the fact that everybody’s care for the company counts equally, Rhonda wasn’t put off by the idea of not involving her own manager. Last but not least, having been with Southwest since 1978, Colleen knows Southwest (and Rhonda’s job) inside out. As a result she genuinely appreciates how her decisions affect Rhonda and how Rhonda’s insights can be the next big opportunity. Empowerment, Bravery & Understanding: high-octane fuel for ideas.