Across the industry, there’s a lot of contention at the moment between airline labor groups and management. Many airline labor groups are frustrated by the current state of things, and are also looking to renegotiate their contracts, as the industry recovers.
Continue reading: United Flight Attendants Give Management -95% Promoter Score
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
This is pretty interesting and perhaps something I’ll implement in my own industry (education). However, I question the “scale.”
“Flight attendants who rate 9-10 are seen as promoters
Flight attendants who rate 7-8 are seen as neutral or passive
Flight attendants who rate 0-6 are seen as detractors”
I feel like it’s heavily weighted towards “detractors.” For example, let’s be extreme, what if…10=promoters, 9=neutral, <8=detractors. Doesn’t seem fair does it? So why is 60% of the scale weighted towards detractors? Perhaps, the scale should just be ranked 1-3 (with 2=neutral). Just little nuances. But definitely an interesting/novel concept.
This just smacks of Toxic.
I get it, in concept, but... it just seems set up to prove one viewpoint.
And I think it underscores that there's nothing united about United.
I stopped flying them a while back, and have since moved on to carriers with happier labor groups. And it shows.
That’s basically the point though; it’s set up to prove that the one viewpoint that is currently being ignored and/or disbelieved is actually true. And, additionally, if it is then listened to, it will lead to a happier labor group, which will, in turn, then have a better chance of winning back customers like yourself. Does anyone have an alternative idea, or at least one that is less “toxic” than this one?
This is when Marketing people run of out B2C to sell, they start selling ideas B2B.
Not that NPS are useless. It actually very insightful if used correctly. The problem is these tools are as good as the users. Give caveman a smartphone and they will probably throw it to hunt rabbits. Intentions of this is pretty clear, 'how happy flight attendants are with management' is just a tool for a blame game.
Barriers for customers to switch airline is a lot less than employees to switch a company.
AFA would have another weapon to extort management. It's easy to blame management, and we love to blame management. Now AFA will have some method of making up a number to justify the accusation.
Try running a company "Family Feud", survey says we have a winner, LOL.
@Lucky
This concept is kind of genius. Really? Maybe for the airline.
It's the same thing. They just double down to make it even more convincing.
Airline management justified something bad by claiming customers love it, based on the net promoter score AND Flight Attendant Promoter Score (FPS)
Decades ago Bob Crandall would still remove an olive because of NPS and FPS if it existed back then.
The FPS promoter and detractor numbers are the exact same formula United uses in nps. 0-6 detractors, 9-10 promoters. It’s identical.
Well some “fodder” for the UA PFA’s “cannon.” IAH = Houston Bush, FRA = Frankfurt, CDG = Paris DeGaulle, PRG = Prague. UA = United, LH = Lufthansa
9 months ago I booked first/biz award travel on UA website, TRES BEAUCOUP POINTS. An open jaw as follows:
18 Sep IAH-FRA overnite UA nonstop 2 hr connect to FRA-CDG LH nonstop.
02 Oct PRG-FRA nonstop 2 hr connect to FRA-IAH UA nonstop.
On 30 July, UA advises to call them (ha-ha) because PRG-FRA flight changed to a time that missed the UA to IAH connection. Called them, waited 45 mins, then agent tells me “no award seats avail FOR A WEEK on earlier LH flight that would have worked. UA agent claimed they had no influence over Star Alliance member LH. Told me to use the bad LH flight, spent a nite at FRA, catch UA nonstop to IAH on 03 Oct. Hotel my cost.
BS! Called LH real customer service. Less than 5 minutes to talk to a 100% helpful agent. She had to check multiple systems, but got me on that earlier LH flight that UA said was unavailable.
Very angry letter on its way to UA CEO Scott Kirby!
The Flight Attendants I’ve come into contact at United have been the worst of all the majors and this was well before the pandemic
I fly United for the service. I greatly appreciate the flight attendants. I need help with getting up and down. I always get help from check in and on the flight. My flights have never been delayed.
At my company they used feedback from all employees to make a bunch of “employee resource groups” that are basically echo chambers for whatever the group is supporting and promoting, and 99% of the agreement workforce doesn’t know they exist and aren’t members. This will lead to the same.
For those questioning the numbers, they are the same numbers United uses for the NPS ratings. Love it. It may just be a scream into the void and not change a damn thing, but I'm 100% here for it. Someone always says, "United/Delta/American/Southwest/XXXXX have the worst flight attendants ever." I'm sorry you had some bad experiences, and I genuinely hope you have a great experience at some point. Most of us are hard-working, professional, personable employees who take great pride in making our customers' travel experiences memorable, regardless of our working conditions, lack of proper tools, or treatment from management. Thank you for posting this.
Agree.
This shows some welcome imagination from the union.
Using the same langauge as management makes it harder for management to ignore them.
If it causes more people (shareholders?) to question the skewed numbers then that's a good sunlight effect.
I just think they should make the questions more granular to identify issues more precisely.
Perhaps they can do that using information from the comments box that will hopefully also be included.
That can show management how to do their surveys better!
That's a risk with management-driven "all employee" surveys.
But this is driven by the union so less likely to be distorted by management.
Little typo: "book out of management's playbook" should presumably be "leaf..."
This is actually a joke of a marketing strategy. There service is so bad they haven’t recuperated from when United name took over after being bought by continental. United is definitely not the Airline’s it use to be when it was Continental, the flight attendant are rude as heck you might find one or two nice one so it make no difference how there graded there services sucks for airline which is why there no longer number one anymore. There doing anything to keep them relevant.
That's is a risk with management-driven "all employee" surveys.
But this is driven by the union so less likely to be distorted by management..
People become complacent in their job and get to relax and believe they don’t have to do much and I believe that United has some of the rudest flight attendants and they probably just need to regroup and hire new people to come in and force retirement for the old one and have a fresh new group of Flight Attendants. I mean being a hostess smiling serving drinks and snacks shouldn’t be so hard. They’re acting as if there really doing a service outside of a few safe measures and waiting on people.. it blows me away that they believe they’re so untitled. They’re no excuses for rudeness for a server period. If you don’t like you job change it or learn how the job is Perfected.
This is all about the union Period. Strategy to separate the bad ratings UNITED Airlines is horrible and they have very rude flights attendants. A hospitality business unexpected.
People become complacent in their job and get to relax and believe they don’t have to do much and I believe that United has some of the rudest flight attendants and they probably just need to regroup and hire new people to come in and force retirement for the old one and have a fresh new group of Flight Attendants. I mean being a hostess smiling serving drinks and snacks shouldn’t be so hard. They’re acting as if there really doing a service outside of a few safe measures and waiting on people.. it blows me away that they believe they’re so untitled. They’re no excuses for rudeness for a server period. If you don’t like you job change it or learn how the job is Perfected.
Hardest part of the job….dealing with people just like Willie Clark. Ole Willie couldn’t hack it. He’d be fired between IAH and DEN. Grow up there Big Will.
Makes absolute sense , often these companies use this scores against hard working employees so they should be shown how the people they badly manage feel about their skills .
Hopefully there will be a program where mechanics can rate flight attendants. For all the fictitious shit they write up, I can't wait to give a zero.
Speaking as a union member at another carrier it is high time something like this came out. Management holds us accountable. We should hold management accountable.
And if there a flight attendant group has no union to collect the data. (Please don’t even think an Employee Involvement Group would substitute as it is financed from the corporate side).
Wow angry much? A lot of times things do fix themselves or can’t be reset inflight. Sorry you have to actually do your job
Hope they listen to Fa’s… since they know what is happening…. they don’t sit behind desks… they actually know
tbh it’s not really novel and this scale is always how NPS (and other “XPSes”) are calculated. It’s a methodology developed decades ago by Bain. It’s very common for employees to do these kinds of ratings of their employers, although it’s usually management who solicits the ratings rather than a union
The multiple questions are loaded (and obviously biased towards driving the union's ulterior motives) and represent a significant deviation from the premise of NetPromoter measured through responses to a single question:
"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?"
The use of the NPS scale in this effort is flawed given the bastardized, biased methodology.
A couple pedantic little NPS corrections:
- If the questions you listed are the ones they’re calculating NPS from, it’s not actually NPS and AFA is wrong to call it that. You can’t measure NPS from any rating scale question. The question needs to follow a pretty specific format. In this case, it should be something like “how likely are you to recommend working at United to a friend?”
- I know AFA did this too, but technically NPS should be expressed as a number rather than a percentage (-95, not -95%). A percentage makes it sound like that’s simply the % of promoters, but it’s more complicated than that (and obviously a negative % doesn’t make any sense in this situation)
- Unless they released a breakdown of each bucket, you can’t assume as you did that 2.5% are promoters. It’s also possible that there were *no* promoters and 95% detractors. The neutral 5% are basically just ignored in that scenario
I’m curious if Singapore or EVA flight attendants were to give scores to their management, what kind of scores would their management get? These two airlines are known to have exceptional customer service compare to US flight attendants and I wonder if somehow they were forced to give good service by the management hence are bitter behind the scenes or maybe management just treats them better?
Two big takeaways.
1. UA's biggest concern right now is getting a pilot contract over the finish line without breaking the bank since UA's pilots are not the least bit interested with what their union and the company negotiated.
2. You better believe that DL feasts on stuff like this even while Sara Nelson runs around Atlanta trying to convince DL flight attendatnts that she can do better.
Lucky I doubt you are an expert or SME in NPS or CI practices - this post couldn't be more wrong as to what the number represents.
What are their suggestions to improve the NPS score? Or is this just a feel-good vent and bashing of UA corporate? Without any clear use for it, I'm afraid its the latter
The problem with the union message is that the flight attendants are not "customers" of UA, they are employees. They are being paid to do a job.
If they are truly that unhappy with their job and/or their employer, then find another place to work. Life is too short to spend it at a job you hate.
Ahhhh....I see they've taken time out of being here ONLY (and absolutely nothing else) for our safety engage in some silly shenanigans. Cute.
Not surprising, I rate UA above American and Spirit. The employees I've encountered were friendly enough, but the product/experience is lousy... It'll be interesting to see where this goes, my guess is management doesn't make any changes, except to stop the scoring and pat themselves on the back, claiming success.
The most entitled work group in the airline. Jeesh know the room. If FAs had accountability in the air I’d actually back the Union here. But there’s none
You do realize every company has customers. It’s called external and internal customers. External is the customers who are the passengers the pay to fly. Internal is the employees who work for the company. Both external and internal customers need to be happy in order of success of a business.
Most large employers do enjoy the publicity that comes up with being thought of as a great place to work.
Fortune magazine has a list of 100 Great Companies to Work For, as does Working Mother magazine, and companies that make these lists tend to put out press announcements.
Companies that feel like that they are on the cusp of making such a list often solicit feedback from employees, and then try to improve employee satisfaction by going after the low hanging fruit at the very least, e.g., are there things they could do to make employees happier that are not particularly expensive?
If United gets enough bad publicity, they should care. It does not help with recruitment or retention of employees to be thought of as a bad place to work.
It’s unfortunate as a newer hire that this is the state of the airline industry. We feel like a number and moral is low.. something needs to change and we are fed up
Promoter scores are how senior leaders shift blame for their own terrible engagement onto the backs of front line managers. HR becomes over engaged and the company drifts away from their culture. So happy to not have to deal with that BS anymore.
Not waiting on hold for 2 plus hours to talk to schedulin…not over staffing domestic flights for no reason…sending intl flights out understaffed…limiting the ability to trade trips during the month…the list is a lot
The only airline that made the Fortune 2022 list of best places to work was Fedex - no passenger airlines.
United doesn't care. They just tried to get the union to pass off a pathetic new contract on their pilots - but the everyday aviator saw through it all and they are back to the drawing door.
I was going to comment saying the same thing. This isn't a true NPS question and there are no clues given as to how they combined several statements into one score. Like NPS used in many companies, the exact process can be tweaked to influence the outcome they're looking for. Here, the union undoubtedly has the motivation to show a low score.
Funny how having -95 make it look bad on themselves rather management. Desperate to cling on a bad employer.
If they hate their job that much, just quit and do something else.
On the other hand, management can see that even they hate their jobs, the turnover is still normal then management can abuse them even more and know they wouldn't quit. At this point -95 or -99 probably doesn't make any difference.
Joke's on AFA.
Have to agree 100%. Instead of complaining all the time, resign from UA and get a new life, based on my experience of travelling on UA , I foresee that few of them would be re- employed anywhere ,to be cynical they would actually have to do some work. Let’s all move on and give some others a chance.
The best case scenario in UA's favor is that there were 2.5% promoters. It is more likely that the % of promoters were actually lower, with some being neutral. Worst case scenario is 0% promoters and 95% detractors. In the latter, 5% are neutral.
Having hotel rooms when we arrive at layovers after long days. Having safe transportation to and from hotels when we arrive and not having to wait hours to get it. Not having to "self help" our rooms and then fight to get reimbursed...let alone the poor people that just can't afford to drop $200 or more on a hotel room last minute because the company didn't do their job. Not flying 2 legs and then going into a cross country redeye flight or sitting for 2+ hours and then flying a redeye flight. Not going back to back 15 hour duty days on the least amount of legally allowed sleep. Having the correct supplies to do the service part of our job instead of telling us to "make do" and then getting yelled at by passengers because we don't have the items. The hold times can and have been over 4 hours easily just to try and speak to someone, and then you get hung up on. Having the ability to trade our days/trips around like we used to before the company started inflating numbers on purpose to kill flexibility. Not being punished for not being at the gate at checkin time when the plane is delayed and not even on the ground at the airport.
Why do we stay? We are hoping and praying for a return to better standards, but trust, they are losing flight attendants left and right
For years airline management has claimed that flyers want bare bones service in exchange for cheap fares. Maybe it's more airlines built the expectation that they can provide $99 fares and provide an adequate service. They can't. What management does is try to find other ways, in addition to cost cutting, to generate revenue. Hence, the flying credit card mills.
You can't have both. Either charges adequate fares and provide a good service or charge low fares and screw flyers. There's no in between.
I find it fascinating that media-hog, Sara Nelson, wants to unionize Delta's F/As while her largest unionized workforce - United - seems to be miserable. Why doesn't she concentrate on fixing things at United before messing with Delta. *scratching my head*
If people thinks Elon Musk is smart or over paying for any Apple products, then falling for marketing bs is not an issue for them.
NPS works like a charm. Just depends on an idiot or a smart person is using it and for what purpose. Pointing fingers is not the intended use for NPS.
Mr. Clark, you have made a blanket statement about almost 25,000 flight attendants. Maybe you and others have experienced rude flight attendants, but that exists at any airline.
"Being a hostess smiling serving drinks and snacks shouldn't be so hard. They're acting as if there really doing a service outside of a few safe measures and waiting on people.. it blows me away that they believe they're so untitled. They're no excuses for rudeness for a server period. If you don't like you job change it or learn how the job is Perfected."
Yikes. Wow. It took me a bit to decipher this. First off, there is a lot of confusion that this survey equals not liking a job. I love my job. I can love my job and be unhappy with management. These things are not mutually exclusive. I, and many others, do not take our frustration out on passengers. That is neither professional nor appropriate. I would LOVE to have all of the tools I am supposed to have to provide even better customer service.
Safety-your statements regarding this are incredibly rude and ignorant, and there is simply no other way for me to state that. The number of security. medical and safety issues dealt with are far more than "a few safe measures and waiting on people." I once dealt with a passenger so violently, physically, and visibly ill that we were diverting. As I spoke with medical personnel, I was continually poked by the man in the row directly behind the ill passenger. The reason for the poking? "My internet isn't working!" I calmly and professionally explained that we had a serious medical situation. Still, I would be sure to compensate this passenger as soon as possible, and I apologized for the inconvenience. Then I returned to my duties.
Please stop demeaning the profession and the people. I truly am sorry you had such awful experiences. If you were on my flight, I would treat you with the same respect, friendliness, and professionalism as I treat all of my passengers. Even if you were one of those people who were unhappy with everything on that flight, up to and including the wallpaper. Your unhappiness with your experiences does not give you the right to crap all over the rest of us. Buying a ticket does not give you that right either. I mean, feel free to rant all you want. Bringing that attitude on a flight only makes YOU look like the entitled jerk, and everyone else notices. I can assure you that it isn't a good look.
Also, we are not "untitled." Our title is "Flight Attendant."
Thank you for the kind statement, Nora! I am happy to hear you have had positive experiences. I certainly hope your future flights go just as smooth and safest of travels.
As a United flight attendant I wish we could score the unions (AFA’s) performance as well. There is much room for improvement.
We don't have First Class seating or business class. Once you have hard to go back.