No business leader can guarantee there will be no further restructuring required to get through the Covid-19 crisis, according to the B2B tour operating boss of dnata Travel Europe.
Managing director Lisa McAuley addressed the issue on a Travel Weekly webcast after completing a consultation with employees over the merger of trade-only brands Gold Medal and Travel 2 that involved the closure of Travel 2’s office in Glasgow and the loss of hundreds of jobs.
Asked if further contraction might be required, she said: “I was asked exactly the same question internally at a staff briefing. And look, where we were when we made the announcement in June, we’d done a forward forecast, and that was to pretty much refund everything up to July. Then we extended out that refund forecast to August, and then extended it out again.
“I think I’m on my fourth forecasting within the last six months and I can’t see that stopping; we will continually re-forecast.
“Is that the last of it? Right now, I’ve built a structure that’s absolutely fit for purpose. And we have been able to bring some parts of the business that used to operate in silos, together. So we’ve managed to get some efficiencies there.
“The structure’s right but, as I said to the team yesterday, it would be really disingenuous of me to say I can guarantee that there are going to be no further cuts, because nobody who’s leading a business right now can say that.”
McAuley added: “What I also said to them, hand-on-heart, is that will do absolutely everything possible to try and keep as many roles as we possibly can. And with the structure that we’ve got, I believe that we can do that.
“We didn’t just take a slight trim to the business, we gave it a quite a significant haircut because what you don’t want to do is do one round [of redundancies] and then do a second round; that’s just painful for everybody because when you’re doing largescale redundancy programmes, or even any scale redundancy programme, you’re delivering a message that nobody wants to deliver and nobody wants to hear.”
Asked how she had coped making such tough decisions, McAuley said: “It was horrendous. There have been times where it’s been really, really, really tough. And you’re tough on yourself as well. But you have to think to yourself, and I’ve always believed this, it’s roles that are made redundant, not people, because that’s the only way that I can personally deal with it.”
She said social distancing had made the process even more difficult.
“What’s made it really hard is that we did all of this virtually,” she said. “If you’re announcing it to a room, you can read the room, and you can gauge people’s emotions, and you can then address that. But when you’re doing it via video, and nobody’s got their cameras on, it’s so hard.
“What I would say is the employee representatives were just exemplary in the way that they held themselves. And don’t get me wrong, it didn’t start like that, because obviously, there’s a lot of raw emotion going around. But I said I didn’t want to compromise the integrity of the consultation process.
“So that’s why you kind of go dark from a trade press point of view, and also a partner perspective, because my priority at that point was just making sure that you run the process as smoothly as you can as you can, so that I can go to bed and sleep okay. And that, actually, you’re trying to disrupt people’s lives as little as you possibly can.”