And the Blooper Award goes to….. Drum Roll, please…. US!
We forgot to hit record on this week’s Zoom call. We are sorry if you missed it. Julie Seitz shared some great stories with us about the Intrepid Spirits she is working with at Delta Air Lines.
Fortunately, we were able to salvage the chat - with questions - from Monday’s call and Julie agreed to generously answer them below:
Julie, in your role at Delta now - how are you gathering information about how Delta employees are working differently - technology, working from home, wants, needs, etc. - in order to decide how to reconfigure workspace in the future?
We are doing some pulse surveys with our employees who work in an office setting to learn about what’s working/not working now.
Social distance guidelines are also extremely important as we understand what must be done short-term (of medium-term depending on how long we must social distance) to accommodate everyone and keep us safe.
We are not going to invest capital into major furniture changes until we are much further down the road and well on the other side of this virus and have a better handle on what the next phase may look like. We just don’t know if we may have multiple exits and re-entries either.
There is a lot of talk about there being more WFH situations. Do you think Delta Air Lines will implement some of that thinking?
Our brand is all about bringing people together and connecting the work AND we’re believers that there is a benefit to being in person.
With that said, I think we will embrace work from home where it makes sense for the type of work someone does and at some reduced frequency (not 5 days a week every week). I do not think WFH is a good long-term plan at 100% for employees who need to collaborate with others to make progress.
We do have about 1/3 of our call center agents working from home full time, which makes sense as that is more of a transactional type role.
We do have employees now asking to come back, where others are happy to keep being at home – we will never please everyone!
The governor of Florida announced this morning that they are "open for business" to home rentals except for the folks from the New York area. With those types of attitudes around the number 1 market in the country, what do you think needs to be done for this NOT to affect Delta?
The NYC market and the coastal FL market are both very important to Delta. We are investing billions of dollars (yes, billions) into LGA and JFK and are confident this will turn around in NYC and traffic will come back.
Certainly, this does affect Delta daily right now and there’s no getting around that. I’m sure there are conversations happening within Delta with many NYC stakeholders about the situation that I am not part of and cannot comment on.
Wall Street is considering “work at home for good” vs. commuting. Do you see the commercial real estate market crashing?
I had not heard that specifically about Wall Street. I don’t think anything is forever and the pendulum will swing again. No, I don’t think the commercial real estate market is going to crash.
NYC has a “short-term” problem as it relates to space and that is their buildings are very tall and the elevators are small. As long as we’re socially distancing there is a capacity problem in getting people up those elevators 2-3 at a time to work in a timely manner. Once the social distancing is behind us, elevators will be back to full capacity and life will go on.
There are so many studies and real data behind why working from home 100% of the time is not healthy or good for a business – engagement drops significantly and when that happens, performance drops which leads to a stock price dropping. There’s a lot of knee jerk reactions happening right now, but this will settle down.
I do think another good thing that will come out of this will be that when people are sick, they WILL stay home and work from there instead of coming to work sick.
Hey Julie, the 2002 Torch Relay was such an incredible event to work on and such an inspiration for our country right after 9/11. Congrats on your awesome position with Delta and will you have a role with the new Olympic sponsorship?
I’ve become a full real estate convert and plan to finish my career on that path, so sadly, I don’t see another Olympics in my future
How will Delta educate consumers on how to be best prepared to fly and do their share to cause a great outcome for everyone involved?
Please see a great update today: https://www.delta.com/
We will continue to use Delta.com, our Delta app and social media to educate consumers.