American Airlines Will Start Scoring Flight Attendants, And It Won’t End Well

American Airlines is reportedly launching an initiative to start scoring flight attendants based on a variety of metrics. While I’m in theory in favor of flight attendants being subject to more of a performance-based system, I have to imagine that this likely won’t end well.

American launching Me@Work program for flight attendants

JonNYC reports on how American is rolling out what’s being called the Me@Work program, whereby flight attendants will be scored by management. The idea is that scores will be based on the last 12 months of data, including things like:

• Customer experience, based on anonymized net promoter score surveys sent out to passengers
• Operational contributions (it remains to be seen what exactly this entails)
• Delays that are coded as being due to flight attendants

These are all the details we have as of now, though I imagine we’ll learn more soon, likely from the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), the union representing American flight attendants, which will no doubt have some thoughts on this.

Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what actual impact these scores will have on the careers of flight attendants, whether their scores are good or bad. Will there actually be repercussions for those who don’t score well, or rewards for those who do score well? Or is this just about giving flight attendants feedback, maybe making them competitive with one another, etc.?

I’m all for more flight attendant accountability, but…

I’ve written in the past about why service on US airlines is inconsistent, and often bad. Among other things, I noted how airlines in the US don’t generally have true onboard managers who evaluate colleagues, and also how there aren’t enough performance based evaluations in general.

So in theory, it’s good to see some sort of a system being set up for evaluating flight attendants. That being said, I suspect we’re going to see some major issues here.

First, one wonders if this is actually the right system for evaluating flight attendants. They’ll be judged by overall impressions passengers have of flights, and also delays? Those are both things that might not necessarily reflect the performance of a specific flight attendant on a flight.

One might find that the average net promoter score is different for a flight attendant who primarily works business class on American’s new Boeing 787-9s on transatlantic flights, rather than one who primarily flies 737s around the country, since I imagine passenger perception will differ based on the overall experience.

Second, I have to imagine that this is going to get a ton of pushback from unions and flight attendants, because by and large, people won’t like programs like this. I’m curious if there has actually been any consultations yet with the union, because if not…

Lastly (and sort of related to the above point), the timing of this just doesn’t seem great, especially in light of the horrible relations at the moment between management and the union. Flight attendants recently issued a vote of no confidence in CEO Robert Isom, and I’m sure they’d love to set up a Me@Work score for Isom. 😉

Anyway, I’m curious to see how this all evolves, and I have a hard time imagining this will be implemented without some major pushback…

Bottom line

American is reportedly introducing a new program whereby flight attendants will be scored based on several metrics, like net promoter scores on flights, delays they cause, etc. While we absolutely do need more accountability for flight attendants, this definitely won’t be well received, especially given the lack of respect a vast majority of American flight attendants have for top management.

How do you see this flight attendant scoring system working out?