The third virtual event of the Communicating Across Cultures series featured an inside look into culture at Southwest Airlines. This discussion was led by James O’Rourke, a professor in the Mendoza College of Business, with guest speaker, Linda Rutherford, SVP & Chief Communications Officer, Southwest Airlines, and moderated by Amanda McKendree, professor in the Mendoza College of Business. This event discussed Southwest’s culture, how they’ve been affected by the pandemic, and how they approach diversity and inclusion within their culture. Rutherford offered specific insights into how Southwest has pivoted its approach to business over the course of the year.
Rutherford kicked off the conversation by giving a brief description of Southwest as a business and place of work. The business employs 60,000 people and owns around 750 Boeing 737s. They’ve had to reduce capacity because of the pandemic, so many of their planes are sitting idle. Southwest has had to pivot both their business practices and aspects of their company culture as employees work remotely, but have shown great resilience in doing so. Southwest committed to not furloughing employees through the end of the year and have found unique ways to keep the culture they established in a physical office and convert it to a virtual office environment. Southwest’s culture and engagement group found ways to continue an employees recognition program online, and created virtual happy hours, trivia events, and other programs for their employees to participate in remotely. In terms of hiring, Rutherford believed that Southwest does a great job at finding the right people in the right roles who fit the company culture. The ability for a candidate to work in a team, have a sense of humor, be a good influencer, and get results are all what makes good chemistry between the culture at Southwest and the employee.
Southwest’s organizational culture was not the only thing affected by the pandemic this year, but their business operations were as well. The airline industry saw an alarming decrease in travel demand in March when the pandemic hit the US. At this time, the company’s focus has been on restructuring and focusing business on projects that will be most profitable to the organization. They’ve had to table some projects in order to focus energy on maximizing revenue. Rutherford said Southwest did an exercise in figuring out what projects were priority to the company and what could be tabled for the time being. Southwest focused not only on updating their services with the best air filtration systems and disinfectants so their customers would feel safer once they return to air travel, but on offering flight deals for travelers, extending vouchers, and extending frequent flyer points to encourage travel on their airlines.
O’Rourke turned the conversation toward diversity and inclusion at Southwest by asking Rutherford to detail what Southwest is doing to become a more diverse workplace. Rutherford thought Southwest has an aggressive commitment to creating a diverse environment. Southwest has implemented standing meetings where employees can talk about diversity and inclusion. They’ve also worked with a consultancy to create a curriculum for their leadership team to learn about leading conversations, understanding upstanding vs bystanding, and identifying microaggressions. Rutherford knows that diversity in the workplace always has the opportunity to improve, but because the culture at Southwest is a highly collaborative and open environment, it makes seeking diverse opinions easy.
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