Maintaining open and honest relations between top management and staff has helped Jet2.com and Jet2holidays retain and recruit staff, according to the firm’s HR director.
Miriam D’souli told Travel Weekly’s People Summit the company had followed an “extremely proactive” recruitment programme in October 2021 as the firm planned its post-Covid recovery.
The company, which has a 12,000-strong workforce, invested heavily early on to attract new and former staff, some of whom had been made redundant and others who left to work in different sectors, she said.
She told delegates: “During the pandemic we did our best to retain the people we had, but we did lose people. It was really hard to go through the redundancies.
“But we made pledges to these people to bring them back – and the majority came back.”
She added: “We were prepared with recruitment and we took a big risk – we invested.”
D’souli said the company’s open-door policy and webcasts on Travelweekly.co.uk featuring chief executive Steve Heapy during the pandemic helped to boost the company’s ‘down to earth’ culture.
She said: “We have a really open relationship with the chief executive.
“During Covid, we kept communications going. People got to know our chief executive through his chat with Travel Weekly editor-in-chief Lucy [Huxley] and people said they liked this person.
“The company’s culture is massive not just for retaining staff but for bringing new people in. I think we are very down to earth. Nothing is off limits; that’s what people love [about the company].”
The company held daily ‘colleague forums’ during Covid to ensure staff had an easy way to communicate problems that needed to be resolved quickly.
“We said ‘tell us what is wrong and we can help you’ and some of it was just basic tools they needed to do the job,” she said. “We listened to them; we had some quite difficult conversations and we made things happen.”
Senior management are also encouraged to keep up dialogue with staff on the ground, she said.
“We ask them to always think ‘when was the last time I spoke to cabin crew and put myself in their shoes?’ We have got more open conversations and that’s crucial. I got to the quarterly meetings with cabin crew and I think we [as a business] are successful because we do that.”
She said recruitment had been made harder for the industry because former staff had found other jobs outside the sector which paid similar salaries without unsociable hours.
“We had pilots working for Amazon. That’s where the risk was, where people were earning around the same amount but not having to get to the airport at 3am. It opened some people’s eyes to what they could have,” she admitted.
Brexit has also ramped up the difficulties of recruitment for travel companies, particularly to find staff overseas, she said.