Workforce management takes flight

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another episode of Capital H. I'm Kyle Forrest, your host and Deloitte's Future of HR Leader. On today's episode, we are joined by Kevin Ma, a principal in our human capital practice, and John early and Tim Gregory from Delta. On today's episode, I'm excited for us to jump in and explore Wings, a next generation workforce management solution for aviation. We'll unpack how a multi alliance ecosystem approach is reshaping human capital and what it looks like in practice through Delta's implementation. Kevin, do you want to start and introduce yourself?

Speaker B: Sure, Kyle. Hi, everybody. My name is Kevin Ma, a principal with Deloitte Human Capital. As you heard from Kyle, my entire career has been into the operational workforce management. And what I mean by that is I focus on the right people, right place, right time, doing the right activities and at the right cost. Pleasure to be here today.

Speaker C: All right.

Speaker A: And John, would you like to introduce yourself?

Speaker C: So, John earley. I'm a 17 year veteran of Delta Airlines, Director of Financial Benefits and Time Management. For the purpose of this discussion, part of my role is really making sure we have the scheduling tools that allows us to optimize the operation and give employees the time that they need off to manage their lives. Great.

Speaker A: And Tim.

Speaker D: Hello everybody. My name is Tim Gregory, Managing Director of HR Innovation and Workforce Technology at Delta Airlines. Uh, work very closely with John. John is sort of our internal customer and our teams are responsible for help John actualize his vision.

Speaker A: Fantastic. So John and Tim, let's talk with the macro background for what was the situation leading to what you all have been achieving, uh, at Delta today? And can you share a little bit around what are some of those workforce management challenges that Delta and other airlines are facing today and perhaps why the prior approaches were falling short in dealing with them.

Speaker C: Kyle, as you can imagine, running an airline is incredibly complex. And we are in a model, of course, where we have to have a very lean cost centric approach to our human resources. But we also want to make sure people have the time off that they need. Now, you try to balance that across a 247 operation that any sort of geopolitical event that you see impacts us, it's difficult. And so we were based on a mainframe application that was 20, 30 plus years old and was not delivering our employees what they needed or what the

Speaker A: operation needed to balance their schedules, geopolitical and weather. Right. Knowing some of the things in the last few years, and absolutely to your point, like the minute something happens, the ripple effect through the system, uh, and then you're talking thousands of employees and maybe tens of thousands of customers that you're trying to navigate through.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And if you look at a station like Atlanta, the busiest airport in the world, we have almost 10,000 employees there on a daily basis. Like, how do you manage that and make sure that you can handle everything that goes on in this world? It's extremely complex.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And so, Tim, you know, when we talk about human capital in aviation at an airline organization, what does success look like from an operational and an employee perspective?

Speaker D: Sure. Well, at Delta, we have a little over a hundred thousand employees. Ninety percent of those are, uh, frontline employees. So the folks that you hear when you call us or you see them in the air or at the airports, and for them, obviously, scheduling is a huge part of this. Right. Flexibility in scheduling, particularly when we're dealing with what we call inside the industry, these irops. Right. Interruption of operations and how quickly we can recover from them. So what really is important for us in Delta, and one of the reasons why we think we are clearly different, differentiating ourselves in the market right now, is the employee experience and what we do for our employees. Employee experience drives the customer experience. It's an age old adage, you know, happy employees make happy customers. But when you need to do that on the scale that we do, half a million people every day, celebrating when you get two minutes early on the other side of the planet, it really requires an intense focus on the employee experience.

Speaker A: Happy when they're two minutes early, and incredible frustration if they're two minutes late. Right. And so your frontline workforce is dealing with this spectrum of human emotion on a day to day basis. And they are trying to show up in a way that represents the brand. And so, Kevin, the background that you have collaborating with John and Tim, like, how did wings originate? Like, what was the gap in the marketplace that needed to be addressed differently?

Speaker B: I'm going to take us back on the memory lane. Way back when I was in my 20s, so I had the pleasure of working with Northwest Airlines, which is now part of Delta, through the merger back in 2008. During that time, I was in a windowless basement in Minnesota, precisely in Eagan, with boxes of hard copies of collective bargaining agreements and memorandum understanding from 1960s. My job is to figure out how to pay people. Right. And schedule people. Right. So because of that experience, my love for aviation and passion, we're actually taking a look at Marketplace today. Right. When we're helping Delta in the journey, we're looking at industry saying that uh, hey, there is not a single enterprise solution that can handle every single facet of operational workforce management. That's including bidding, the scheduling, the trade and swap, time calculation, compliance with the bargaining agreements, and FAR117 some of the industry regulations. So there is an opportunity for Deloitte to bring our expertise in the industry. Knowing the industry pretty well with aviation and working with vendors in the marketplace, in our ecosystem, trying to come together a innovation that can solve this challenge by bringing more efficiency into the operations and elevating employee experience. So that's how this solution was born. We call it Wings because we love abbreviations, acronyms. It stands for workforce Intelligence Next gen solution. And then, um, just happened to be. Sounds great for airlines.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I don't know if many stories, many career journeys and passions started in a windowless basement surrounded by collective bargaining agreements, but I think we're fortunate that yours did. Right. So Kevin, do you want to share a little bit more? How does it actually function across the workforce lifecycle? Right. Because I'm sure John and Tim and many listeners probably have experience with. I'm trying to make a technology decision. I see what's in the market. I've got some pain points. Not everything kind of can get solved. I'll go with this one because it's the best of the bunch. Right. But I know that there's some things I'm going to have to leave off the table. So how does it function to your point that it is a multi ecosystem play, but coming to an organization with now we have an approach that can solve maybe a broader swath of things that you might have considered in the past.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, thank you, Kyle. That's a good, uh, starting point. Right. So let me just give an overview of the entire cycle of workforce management. I think by taking sort of the journey, we'll have a better appreciation of what you can do for the industry as a whole and beyond. So with workforce management, right, right people, right place, right time, right cost, doing right activities, you always start with a T minus X days. T as in the day of operation. We're always operation focused. Right. That's the key for airline. For, um, many other industries with frontline workers. We're going back from T minus 30 plus days. That's typically a bidding process taking shape where we're taking the demand of the workload from the workforce from upstream systems. In this case, could be the network planning for the flights that would drive a lot of work demand. And then the bidding process could be critical to make sure that based on the operating procedures and the senior audience skills and whatnot. The right people will be placed into the right position at right time to support the operation of the airline. Then the time progresses forward.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: You're getting closer to day of operation. Now you have to do a lot of uh, optimizations because people may be going on absence, going on leave, going on vacations. Right. There may be changes in the flight schedule. They have to change the demand. So there's a lot of flexibility and dynamic changes happening this time still before day of operation. As we get closer to day of operation, T minus 1, typically that's where we have some what clarity because the nature of the business that uh, they're going to be irops, right? Irregular operations, then day of operations, there's also going to be a fluctuation of the schedule. But this is also where actual time gets locked against the work they've done. So that's now triggered into the time calculation piece of the workforce management. And uh, the day after operation is also important and critical because the nature of the business, many elements of data, uh, are now present during the day off. They typically get settled after the day of operations. They come into the system and we have to retroactively apply to make sure that schedule is up to date, that drives their overtime. The pay are calculated correctly and the changes are adjusted so that we can handle the on cycle payroll as well as off cycle payroll should there need to be any changes. As you can see, the entire cycle is pretty long in journey. It's not a single week or single pay period. It often elapses multiple months, 90 days normal and sometimes can be almost half a year. And because of nature in today's world there's not a single platform that can handle every single thing. So most companies rely on um, different point solutions for different steps on the journey. And because of that we see the efficiency gain opportunity to have a single solution does everything in a streamlined fashion. Ergo that's how Wings was born. And we're able to apply quite a bit of capabilities at Delta.

Speaker C: Yeah, and Kevin did a really great job outlining just the complexity of the schedule from the beginning. Where we plan our network, you plan your resource, you bid the schedule and changes in irop. Now layer on top of that in an increasingly complex state and federal law framework. We got paid sick leave, we got paid family leave, we got fmla. Oh and by the way, you got wage an hour, you got regular rate of calculations that different. You gotta do all that in a system. And if you get into A world where you're trying to do that with one vendor, it's hard. And Kyle, we tried, we tried to do a single vendor and we did it multiple times, I think, I mean we failed 5ish or more times. And what we did every time was kind of what you said. We went out, got a consultant, got a broker, filled out the rfp, sent it out there, brought them in there and says, well, this person meets most of our needs, let's go with them. And then you go into an implementation and sure, the things that you think you meet, great, but what about that 10% that doesn't? And that's where you try to, you beat it and you badger it and you MacGyver it and you bubble gum helmet and then it falls apart at the end. It's true brittle. Well, Kevin came through and we're able to do is get that tool that meets that 90% and then you do that multi vendor landscape where you can build around it for the pieces that work. And that's what enabled us to finally to get over the edge here.

Speaker D: You know, the other thing about that also is there is an inherent flexibility that it provides. It may seem counterintuitive, but bringing in multiple vendors and filling in some of those gaps. One of the things that Delta does really, really well in terms of our uh, completion factors on time arrivals, departure, there is a flexibility, there's a math underneath it. And I think Kevin, John, uh, you just did a great job explaining a lot of that math and how the variables and the constants of that. There's also an art on top of that that comes with experience and skill. And if those combined systems can't reflect that, you're going to get brittle again. And it gets really, really hard, particularly with a lot of things that we deal with. If you have a cascading sort of IROP rebuilding the network and getting everybody where they need to be again so you can get back and start that next day really, really challenging without the math and the art.

Speaker A: And Tim, maybe we'll stay there and build for a moment and come back to a couple of other things. But like with what Kevin and John shared about the complexity, the challenges with prior vendors, like what were some of the specific problems at the moment when you were introduced to Wings as a solution that Delta was specifically trying to solve to deliver better value to the business and to your customers?

Speaker D: Well, at the time, I mean it was pretty fundamental sorts of things. I mean we had a pretty archaic sort of system, uh, set up where it was some of it was paper based, some a lot of spreadsheets and certainly by the standards we started that project, I want to say 2023 was that. So it's been about a couple years now but when we started that it was nowhere near where it needed to be. Any anybody who's a digital native coming in and working there, this would seem quite archaic. So the employee experience was suffering tremendously on a topic that's really, really important to people, their schedule and their time. So we went after that, I mean I think particularly for my part and relying a great deal. John, he's got phenomenal expertise and the Deloitte team that came in to get the process engine, a lot of people into the room which was I think a little bit new for our business. You know when we first got introduced to this, our internal client was like, hey, we're um, going to install this software. And John and I were like, okay, we're not going to go through this again. And that's when we started reaching out to you all and saying look, we need a little bit more coordination on sort of the process engineering and driving some standardization across this.

Speaker A: And John, you started to say it right relative to some of the advantages that a multi vendor approach delivers versus a single provider. But can you share a little bit more about what are some of the benefits that you've seen thus far?

Speaker C: Yeah, the base core of the tool informally brought in handles 90% of that functionality. When we were able to layer the servicenow on top of it and bring in that mobile view to employees, we solved employees abilities to manage their schedules outside of the operation. So we have ability employees to swap their schedules. You can move your schedule as much as you want to meet your personal needs and it happens all the time. We bid that schedule and within like a week they changed it all over the place, which is great. But prior to this new system we put in, it would take hands on a keyboard to do it. So you're talking four to five days and it's like, oh, Tim says he wants to swap with Kevin. I gotta go to Kevin. I got Kevin, do you really want to swap? And then Tim, is this what it is? And then we back and forth and it's in there. And then Tim's like, oh, that's not really what I meant. And it all falls apart. Now you have a mobile swap board where employees can go on there, they see it, they pick it, they validate it. Since we've gone live, swaps have almost doubled. And what's fascinating, when swaps double employees are able to manage their schedules. Remember this is a 24,7 operation. People live 24,7 lives. 15% decrease in absenteeism. So you're seeing that across the board and then that tool off the shelf that meets that Ah, 90% requirements. Our timekeepers are faster and more able to complete their work and we've taken all that manual work of the swaps off of them so their jobs are easier, employees can get the time off they want. This operation runs smoother. It's just a win, win, win.

Speaker A: Those data points are incredibly powerful. Right. Like measurable double digit percent impacts. So Kevin, I now want to come back and can you share a little bit more. How did this multi ecosystem play partnership between Amazon Web Services, ServiceNow and Infor come together and how do they each play a role in delivering this end to end solution that is wings?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's a great question. Right. So if you think about what I said earlier today's landscape, there are points solution everywhere across a journey in the lifecycle of workforce management. Right. What happened there is that each point solution will handle a single vertical. Because of that you don't have the same experience from step one to step two to step three. How we work with AWS service on E4 is actually different approach completely. We're not solving it by one step a time, we're solving as a layer across entire horizontal space so that you have the consistency experience from step one to step five. So what that means that AWS is empowering, um, the scalability in the hyperscaler perspective because the sheer volume of transaction data and the swaps and timekeeping calculation. Right. We need a robust platform to handle all the variabilities in demand for performance. And Infor is on top of aws. So the two of them combine nicely together, provide that performance that we need. Such as Atlanta Airport, 10,000 employees 24, 7.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: That volume is massive. And then ServiceNow provide a layer on top of that functionality primarily on um, the bidding and the workflow side of things. Because using what they're best for workflow architecture, orchestration, we're able to using ServiceNow's ability to really tailor the individual need for different bidding process for different work groups across different stations. And because ServiceNow's engagement layer. Right. With a portal experience we can have a unified engagement experience. With ServiceNow you can launch different capabilities directly from a ServiceNow experience that's including ServiceNow bidding, but also in for ship, trade and swap and time pop request. So in this way we're uh, Actually creating a very harmonic hybrid with suite technologies with three vendors and deliver value for Delta.

Speaker A: That's incredible because especially when you think about when people are talking about things like how do you use AI automation capabilities to really redesign, reimagine work? That's in essence, what you did. Let's not look at one step at a time. Let's look at the entire thing and say, what if we did this differently? Right. And John, you already shared a little bit from some data points on, like, what better looks like now. But can you also share a little bit about how has this changed how Delta is managing its workforce? Like, are you now thinking differently relative to how you engage with employees? How you drive that ability to take advantage of this type of solution and have that flexibility, that all is the happier, more productive workforce, Lower absenteeism, reduced overtime, I imagine driving just positive customer engagement out with your end customers who are flying or in airports or otherwise.

Speaker C: Yeah. And Tim, hit it earlier on the key driver. The key improvement for Delta really is that employee experience. And I believe the NPS score is like 90 that employees are giving us on the tool, which is phenomenal. And if you think about the day in the life of, let's say, a, uh, gate agent, and you're getting there and you're managing and it's stressful and, uh, things are going on, your ability to come to work prepared, to do your day and to be your best that day is huge. And if you have a bad experience, you can't get the day off, you're not going to be fully engaged. Right. And so when employees have that key driver, that employee experience that says, this is a place that I want to work is huge, we'll just plug it in. There's a reason why we're number nine in great places to work. And part of that is that driver for that employee experiences.

Speaker D: I love that.

Speaker A: So, Tim, there's obviously AI and automation capabilities brought through these vendors. From a Wings Solution perspective, how are you thinking about how as you look at the Wings roadmap, the vendor roadmap, you know, as part of the ecosystem, how does that continue to evolve into, you know, other AI automation capabilities that you all are going to leverage and drive business value going forward as well?

Speaker D: Yeah. So getting back again to employee experience, we're looking to leverage AI to drive improved employee experiences. And that may mean enabling capabilities that give them more time to work with our customers, to engage with customers, to build and develop their teams. So one of our largest investments that we're making this year is what we're calling our digital front door as a sort of a digital concierge for employees. And as uh, our internal research has shown, their schedule, their pay, their internal pass travel benefits, we call it pass travel and non revving, but managing that also provides opportunities for agentic capabilities and connecting. Let's say, you know, you're taking a look, you've got some availability, uh, your schedule allows you to benefit from some of the flight travel that we have available. Combine those two worlds through agentic personalized experiences could unlock some really extraordinary experiences for our employees. It's like, we know you've got some time coming off these particular flights may be really, you know, less booked. You might have a higher percentage chance. We let our employees know we have uh, we use machine learning to let our employees know the percentage chance of them getting on a particular flight. So you combine those two worlds together and you create something that really feels unique and makes you feel proud to work at Delta.

Speaker A: Okay, so Tim, that's one example of kind of what's in store ahead relative to um, capabilities that are going to be impactful for the workforce. What else is on the roadmap relative to things that you're going to be rolling out from an agentic capability perspective that you think are going to drive some improved outcomes for your employees and for Delta.

Speaker D: Well, I'll tell you what, I'll maybe turn it over to John a little bit. John and I, we obviously work very, very closely together for each of the coes that we have within Delta. And there's some ideas that we've been kicking around. I think the MoveWorx acquisition with ServiceNow opens up a whole bunch of opportunities. We're really excited about that partnership. But I think one of the things that we were thinking about is like, how can you have an agent that is personalized, understands your background, what your needs are, and can advocate for you? Some of this is a little bit new when you first join, although Delta doesn't have a lot of unions, right? But it can feel that way. And if you join for the first time and you're not really aware what that might feel like, having an agent who can coach you through some of those things could accelerate your productivity and also not feel as much of a shock to you sometimes. But John, you got other ideas as

Speaker C: well and no, it's perfect. You know, go back to Kevin's earlier comment about the flow, right? So you start from the very beginning and you say like, how many people do need it when we need them, right? There's that process, but you could build something over that that helps you kind of sort through all the different scenarios and build that as well too. And then you go in and says, okay, now I need to build a schedule in the operation that meets what Poise needs, right? Well, most of my people want Friday, Saturday off, and Tuesdays are low work days and Saturday low work days. What schedule can I build? So you could pull something in there as well too. So all of that resource planning up front, you can do that. Then you get to the employees. Being able to manage your schedule past travel is one of the greatest benefits from Delta.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: When you come in, how do you do it? But you got to be able to take advantage of it.

Speaker D: It.

Speaker C: So now you're a new employee, you're at Delta, you're at Atlanta, there's 10,000 employees and you are number 10,000 on the seniority list, both on the flights and the time off. Now imagine it was you go in, you're like, I got two weeks of vacation to burn. How in the world am I going to burn it? And the tool can go through? And we're going pie in the sky here. Hey, it looks like based off historical patterns and transition shorty, you could get these two weeks off. But it's also when we fly low to Portugal. How about you want to work that as well too? And by the way, it's time we can hook you up with Delta Vacations. That multi environment, pulling it in there, each step of that journey, you can optimize that.

Speaker D: Ah.

Speaker C: And find ways to really just take things just a little bit further than employee experience.

Speaker A: I love that. And Kevin, from a wing solution perspective, are there things that you know are being planned on the roadmap in collaboration with the vendors that will help deliver and bring some of those things to life?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right. Movers is exciting news for all of us, right. Because of multi vendor approach, we, uh, try to create a couple agents this year working with our friends at Delta to make sure that we bring true business value again, as John said, right. Pie in the sky. Think about what's the art of possible, right? Why don't we have an agent, uh, supported bidding process experience for the employee. If you're 10,000, uncertainty, you have to bid at, uh, five in the morning. Why don't you program the agent to bid on your behalf when you can sleep in for two hours, Right. Those are some examples we're thinking about. How can you make an employee's life easier for a better experience? Also at the same time still meets operational needs.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: So agents can help in the bidding setup process. Because with so many employees, so many operational shifts, it's a lot of lines, right? Each line is a shift.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker B: Agent can help, agent can help employees on their behalf. Right. And, uh, Infor also has AI capability as well, Right. Also machine learning. So we can combine working with both funders to keep on adding more on top of what we have so far already. Good example. Here is the Billboard Marketplace, right? You can do trade and swap with no employees, right? John and I can swap a shift. I can give my shift to Tim. But if we don't have people available, we put on a marketplace. Why don't we have an agent to find the best available extra overtime shift to pick up?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: There are a lot of applications we can think about once we really do sit down with the vendors, sit down with the clients together and, uh, think, what is the art possible to take advantage of the power of AI nowadays

Speaker C: and take it a step further. We have all this history and this new tool of when people are swapping, when they're requesting time off. Imagine a world where you can then input all that data in a tool to help you build schedules that are even more in tune with what employees want off. And then when Kevin goes to bed, hey, this is Kevin. Based off your last three years of time off and swap history, these are the schedules we think would be most beneficial to you.

Speaker A: That truly is where you get to this, like personalization at scale, Right? Like hyper personalized. That's incredible.

Speaker D: That's the thing we seek for our customers, right? At the end of the day, we need to bring that for our employees and that level of personalization narrowly casted and unique to their experience. It's exactly what we want to provide to our customers.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, Tim and John, maybe final question to you both. Obviously you had to start this journey and for others who are hearing things like this, who maybe have similar pain points, what's a piece of advice that you would give them relative to starting this journey and kind of tackling workforce management in a way that you know is going to deliver on those measurable business outcomes that you all have seen?

Speaker C: So I didn't come up with this, but I think it's the best quote I've ever heard. Someone told me once, uh, maybe it was a Deloitte consultant, that if you have a bad process and you buy an expensive new technology, all you have is an expensive bad process. And so you got to start from the beginning that mapping it out and actually working through all of those processes and doing the process engineering first and go people first and process first. We'll make sure you have the right technology and the right landscape of technology, whether you need one vendor, two vendors, three vendors, four vendors, whatever it might be to really hit the right solution.

Speaker D: Some companies, it's a little bit harder than others. You know, at Delta, as John had mentioned, It's a 247 operation, so we tend to be action biased, right? Recover from the IROP and get it done. But there's an organizational patience that's required to do all the upfront work. But someone also famously said, you know, every battle is won before it's ever fought, right? And all that work that you do up front pays off massive dividends in the end in terms of reduced risk and cost.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, Kevin, Tim and John, thank you for joining us for this conversation on wings and the future of workforce management in aviation. You know, congratulations for the incredible results you all have seen at Delta. And if you enjoy the episode, folks, be sure to subscribe and stay tuned for more conversations on how organizations are rethinking work, technology and human capital.

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