Where employee experience takes flight with Maruchy Cantu

Speaker A: Hello, HR professionals. Good news for a limited time. This episode of the Love youe People podcast is valid for five professional development credits towards shrm, cp, SHRM SCP and HRCI recertification. Stay tuned to access your certification code.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Love youe People podcast. I'm your host, John Duesberg. If you're new here, this is the show where we explore how people first strategies help organizations and their teams flourish. Today I'm joined by Maruchi Kontu, Executive Vice President of Administration at Dallas Fort Worth International. Here, Maruchi brings years of leadership experience from major private sector brands like PepsiCo, Frito Lay, and UPS before she transitioned in to lead an expansive public scope. In this episode, we dive into how Marucci helps lead a campus larger than the island of man, Manhattan. Navigating 27 square miles, 2400 direct team members, and an extended workforce of over 35,000 partners. She shares how DFW built its One DFW culture, launched a human centered five pillar employee promise, and operationalized the principle that employee experience equals customer experience. If you've ever wondered how to influence subcultures, align partner organizations, or drive innovation while keeping people first, you won't want to miss this conversation. Let's dive in. Ruchi, welcome. So grateful to have you today.

Speaker C: Uh, thank you, thank you to the entire team that pulled this together and certainly, Holly, for the recommendation to share the DFW story. Um, certainly, we, we are a community asset as an airport and, uh, very proud of the organization that we have and the people we get to influence every day. So thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah. Well, welcome. So excited to dive in and learn all things about DFW and your strategy as a People first leader. So we'd, um, like to actually start with just a little more background. I think it's really helpful for our audience just to have context of kind of the scope of leadership that you manage today, uh, in your role. But I also know that, you know, you have a lot of experience leading very large private sector brands. You know, PepsiCo, Frito Lay, and you've made this m. This transition into a large public organization. Right. And so that's kind of our first question is, in addition to your scope of leadership, where are you today? Tell us a little about, about this transition. What some of the lessons learned, the experience that you have, um, as you've now moved into your role at dfw.

Speaker C: Yeah, so, John, I started my professional career, uh, with UPS in Human Capital and just truly fell in love with it. It's what I chose to study. It's what I believed in. I'm very much into the business side of business, but I really enjoyed the people side because that's how you can actually get things done. And so I've had the pleasure and privilege of working for some phenomenal organizations. Um, and I got to a point in my career where I found that I wanted to stretch outside of just human resources and be able to really flex the muscle of business in a meaningful way. And I had an opportunity when dfw, uh, reached out, um, to keep and retain what was really tried and true. My experience of impacting business through people and adding other things on. So I have responsibility for our communications and marketing team. I have our community and government affairs team. Uh, I have what we call business development, which is if you think of small businesses or previously minority and female owned businesses, it's really the development of giving people an opportunity to do business with the airport in a meaningful way and kind of starting to grow their portfolio. I also have enterprise risk management, which is what you think of. It's the insurance products, it's the assessing risk from the enterprise planning perspective and also the human capital side of safety which, uh, sits in that space. Um, so it really truly has been just a wonderful opportunity to stretch all of those areas. I tell people all of those areas, deeply touch people. So it's an expansion of the people first, uh, type of approach that I personally believe is what I do best.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. That is a lot. A very large scope of leadership. Uh, and so thank you for just that background. Um, you know, you know, touches a lot more than just maybe what people think of as a traditional HR role. How has that shifted, kind of moving into, we'll call it more of a public entity. Right. Is there is certain, you know, differences of how you've operated in the past, how you operate now. Would just love to hear or learn a little bit more about that too.

Speaker C: Yeah, so actually that was my initial apprehension. Um, I went through the whole interview process and the CEO at the time, Sean Donahue, who's fantastic, a great leader, now retired and doing some work in retirement. But, um, that was my apprehension. Private sector, I understood, um, when you're a publicly traded company, things just get done a certain way. It was always about the one constant, which was change. It was always about, uh, finding ways to get the best out of people. And in a world that is moving very, very quickly and coming here. I mean, I think we all have our own perceptions when we go to the dmv or any other governmental entity. Um, this perception of, uh, slow to change, slow to serve. Not always do we think about the highest level of customer service. And so I truly was not sure. And I shared that with our CEO at the time, um, through the process. And I said, look, if you need to move to the next candidate, feel free. Like, I get it. I had another offer I was also contemplating and he also coming from, he came from private sector airlines. Um, he said to me, uh, I'm going to give you some more time, but I want you to think about a couple of things while you're, while you're taking the time. And he shared with me that DFW is unique. We are a governmental entity. We are owned by the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, but we are not run or managed by the cities or those governmental entities. We have a appointed board. And he said, look, yes, there are some rules we have to follow that are government rules, uh, that procurement is an example that create a little bit more of a challenge to get things done quickly. He goes, but Marici, that isn't the case in most of our decisions. Um, not only the fact that we're owned by two cities do we have some more independence, but we really, truly had a leadership that believed in getting things done quickly. That we had brought in a C suite level individual about seven years before. I started solely focused on innovation and change. So it has been a pleasure for me to come into a world that I thought was going to be very structured and not very focused on people to working for an organization that's Moving quickly. We're a 4 Pete in customer service. Uh, we truly pride ourselves in the best culture and we can go more into that. But it's been unbelievable. There, there are some governmental rules we have to follow and things that we do, but we generate our own revenues, we're not publicly funded. Um, so we in many ways are like a private entity.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's really interesting. So it's, it's like the, you have the heart of this private sector, you know, in terms of, you know, performance and, and, you know, just continuing to focus on the customer experience. Um, but, you know, still, you know, there is some structure there, you know, for the public entity. So it's an interesting kind of balance I'm hearing.

Speaker C: Yeah. And John, it. Some of the things I think, just to add really quickly, some of the things I think that people like about governmental entities is the stability. And so, and we do have that. I mean, there is more stability here than There is in a publicly traded organization. And so we keep the heart of that. And I'll be honest, there certainly are people or have been people. Uh, when I got here, I was a bit surprised. I heard some commentary about, well, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Well, I was like, oh my gosh, no, if we can find a way to do it better, let's do it better. But the nice thing is we have such wonderful people that when challenged the right way and shown opportunities to do better, a lot of our folks have really adopted to this new idea within my own team, um, that yes, as long as we respect their input, their opinions, their concerns, we have found ways to it's not broken, but fix it anyway. And it's been a really nice transition.

Speaker B: I feel like that's just, uh, sage advice. No matter what entity or organization someone's in. That, um, um, that's refreshing to hear that you're driving that spirit, uh, within DFW as well. And it kind of tees up the next question. So that's great. In terms of just context, what is the environment that you're kind of leading through today? Um, but when I, you know, as we've prepared for our time today, you know, I've learned, you know, my understanding is dfw, the airport is its own zip code. Like you have your fire department, uh, police, emergency services, you know, I mean there's a lot of, you know, kind of underneath, you know, the day to day operations. Right. And I can't help but think there's got to be just naturally subcultures within these different teams and business units and organizations that exist underneath kind of the DFW over our overall umbrella. So tell us a little bit about that. How do you, with, with all these unique kind of sub, uh, teams and organizations, how do you bring this together for one dfw, how do you create the sense of community across, you know, this vast organization that you're leading?

Speaker C: Having previously worked for global companies, really large companies, um, I think there's, in large organizations you've got the overarching corporate culture, but then when you have different divisions, you've got subcultures within those divisions. I kind of, I, I would say it's similar. The difference is we're all on one campus. And so that makes it even more unique. Right. If I've got a group in California and a group in Colorado, um, they day to day don't interact as much. Right. In this case, we're all interacting together. And yes, we are about 27 square miles, um, of DFW property. We're larger than the island of Manhattan. But we all come to work right here, right? And so we're all interacting together and, um, all for a common cause and purpose. Like, the one beautiful thing is our employees are fully dedicated, 100% into one common purpose, and that's connecting the world. Um, and so our police officers, all police officers have their own unique culture. It just is what it is. What they face every day is very different from what our office, clerical or administrative staff will face. Um, we are further complicated by the fact that on top of the fact we have police officers, firefighters, we are a city, so we have every city service you can imagine. We do our own code and construction. Um, we do all of our professional services, all the customer experience. We're a landlord, a very large landlord, not just for airport terminals, but for car dealerships, for restaurants, for warehousing. Um, and so we've got real estate teams, all the things you would think of. Um, we work really, really hard to keep the core culture of dfw, not only of our own employees that we payroll, the 24, 2500 or so people, but even the partners. You know, we have over 200, almost 300 retail locations. We're their landlord. Their employees aren't ours, but we treat them like they are. We host big award ceremonies for recognition that we do jointly with their own employers. We provide website resources. And so we recently rolled out across the enterprise a, um, deployment, ah, of what we consider to be our employee promise. And that really is tied and tethered to what we believe our employees want out of the employment relationship and obviously what we're willing to give to that employment relationship. So there's a clear expectation, to the degree that we can. There's a term here called 1DFW that includes our employees, our concessions employees, our airline employees, our governmental employees. You can't get to the other side to get on your aircraft without the government, Right? And so we really work very, very hard. Our relationship at this airport is probably stronger than I've seen at any other domestic airport. For those who had the privilege of traveling during the shutdown, the unfortunate shutdown of the government, we suffered far less than any other airport that we know in the United States. Our people came to work not paid. And it's because of the culture that we have here, faa, across the board, there were some disruptions, but here we were able to send people to other airports, or the government was able to send their FAA agents or officers to Other airports because they were so dedicated, based on our relationship. Wow.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Kudos to you and the team. You know, just for all tsa, I know that was a very challenging time, uh, that you were able to help, help navigate. So, Maruchi, tell us a little more about the employee promise. You know, what, what, you know, where did that come from? What, how, how did that, you know, get rolled out? What, what's your experience been? I'm curious just to lean into that, unpack that a little bit more.

Speaker C: So I joined, I'm going to call it Covid recovery. I joined in. It was December of 21, call it January of 22. Um, and we were trying to figure out what the new normal was going to be for us. I think all of us on this call, I see many friends and colleagues, uh, that are on the line, but I think we were all struggling with what is going to be the new normal. People's expectations of employment changed, how they wanted to work changed. Um, lots of employers were doing the work from home. Flexibility. And we did that when we didn't know what else to do. But golly, we're an operating airport. We can't get people through an airport if we're not physically here to provide the service that we provide. We were up against a bit of a challenge. We had people leaving when we started bringing people back to work. And we knew there were enough people out there that we can bring on that would value what we had to offer. And what we had to offer wasn't stay home five days a week and just provide a service. It was come to work. We're going to create or continue because we have had a great culture. We're going to foster this incredible culture. But we want to see you every day because our customers need to see you. And even if you're in the corporate office, you need to be here as a team. And so, um, what, what we did is we first started with a gamification tool where we invited a percentage of our population, a cross section, to kind of tell us what was important to them based on that. And we did hire a marketing firm to do this based on that. We then did a series of roundtables to kind of validate what we'd heard or augment or enhance what we had. And then we did an enterprise wide survey and it was all around, what do you value when it comes to the employment relationship? What do you expect as an employer that we're providing you if you work here? And from that we synthesize that down to the Things that matter. And then we're in the process. It's still early. We launched it in January. Officially, we are starting to bring it to life through testimonials where employees are saying not only is this a pillar in our promise, but this is how I have been able to experience this at our airport. And it's going to be a living, breathing, we've got five pillars. We'll have five people tell their story and we'll get new stories as we go. And we've been very clear these are aspirational pillars. I mean, we aren't always going to hit it right every single day. We're human, but you can hold us accountable to it. And so that was, uh, a deployment for us. Now whoever we recruit, they know what we're offering and what we're not offering. And we hope that that'll help continue to foster the culture that we're looking to create here.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's, I, uh, that I love that. It's really cool. I, I, I was speaking to, uh, Chro recently and um, you know, he was sharing that one of the ways that they communicate, um, their EVP or employee value proposition, sounds kind of like the employee promise that you referenced is, is what he called love stories. Love stories about the impact or the experience that they've had in their workplace that has impacted them and professionally. Right. And so now all of a sudden their colleagues are hearing these stories. And I found that, you know, stories are powerful, right? People remember stories, they relate to stories. So what better way to bring, you know, uh, you know that, that employee promise to life is through the stories from employees themselves. So kudos to you. I love that. Did I, did I capture that correctly?

Speaker C: You did. You did, absolutely. And some of this will be external facing. So anybody out there that wants to kind of keep track of dfw, it' on our employment webpage. Um, but we're still in the process of developing. So, yeah, it'll be internal and external storytelling so people know what we're about.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's just a great insight. Right. Just idea of storytelling through the employees lens, uh, about, uh, their experience and why they want to be a part of this team. So I love that as just a kind of a key takeaway. Kind of goes into our next question here, which is, so you have direct DFW employees. I think you mentioned around 2400, 2500. But that's not the full story. Right. There's a lot more people. I think, I think we, we referenced around 35,000 people. Right. That are just day to day operations. Right. This is everything from food and beverage to, you know, me coming in and putting my luggage. You know, just the whole experience I have as a passenger. And so to me, that is an interesting challenge because I feel like, uh, in an organization, maybe a private organization or so, hey, I'm setting this evp, we're activating it, we're launching it, and I kind of have this direct connection with our own employees. But you have all these people that influence your guest or passenger experience that are not direct employees. And you have a lot of them. Right. So tell us more about this dynamic. How does. How do you manage that? How do you navigate that? How do you influence, you know, uh, what that looks like for this broader group that do have an impact on your. On your guest experience?

Speaker C: Ultimately, yeah. It's interesting because when I worked for Frito Lay, for example, you know, we made product, we controlled the product, we packaged the product, we sold the product on the shelf. Um, and to a large degree, not exclusively because grocery stores had a role, but, um, to a large degree, we controlled our brand, we controlled our product. And when you and I bought a bag, we took it home, we ate it, and it was the brand. Control was with Frito Lay, um, dfw, you'll. You'll see this. You can follow any airport on social or just see, you know, people chatting on different channels. But DFW has a brand, too. However, we don't directly control that brand entirely. There are things you'll see where people blame DFW on something that we don't directly control. It's your airline, or it's the baggage carrier that the airline has contracted with, or it's CBP when the customs lines are long, or it's TSA when, you know, that's really slow and people aren't getting through to the other side. But we don't believe in pointing the finger. That never will result in a better overall DFW brand. Same thing with our concessionaires when you go buy food or goods, um, or services. So we take a very, very, very different approach. Um, and it is really, I think, unique, and I think it's part of our success story. Um, every one of our badged employees are ours in a way, whether we directly control or indirectly control. So our 2,400, we've got about, call it 1500, that are more contingent and support, whether it's seasonality or whatever it might be, those are ours. And obviously, we have direct leadership and control over that staff, um, in a large way, however, everybody else, it's done through influence and relationships. And so for us it really truly is, as I mentioned before, the relationship we have with the local TSA or CBP or our concessionaires, we take such a unique approach. If you think about real estate, if you own a shopping center on the corner and you're going to lease a spot to a service or a goods or a foods organization, you lease it. What happens in that space is up to them. If they forfeit on their lease, they're contractually obligated to you, you're good, you move on. We absolutely do not do that. Every single one of our concessionaires, we have an integrated relationship with. We are working with them to understand their sales volume. We are helping them with some marketing dollars. We do um, kind of a, a marketing campaign. It's really more of a, uh, helping them to check the quality of service with their employees so that we can give feedback and they can recognize and they can also address areas where they have concerns. And so we really, truly do feel that we own that part of that relationship with our partners. And we have such a great relationship with those partners that even publicly, um, they are very, they're very appreciative of the extra time that we take. You know, the same, same brands are often in different airports. They see the difference between one airport and another. And that is why I mentioned earlier, we have a 4 peak for our industry on large airports. We've got four years in a row, which is, I think we're the only airport that has in the large category, uh, receive such an honor. So that, that is how we do it. It's a lot of influence, it's a lot of day to day leadership. It's a lot of metrics and management. Um, we couldn't do what we do without all of the partners that we partner with daily.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I love that it's so you. I'm just going to go back to a couple things that I wanted to just learn a little bit more about and, and also for everyone in the audience, if so we have kind of a philosophy, uh, ITA group working with different client partners. We call it Ex equals cx. So if I focus on the employee experience or the associate experience, that's going to help influence a positive customer experience. Right. And so this, you know, this whole Ex equals CX strategy. Right. And I think in some ways, you know, you're, you're, you're referencing this Maruchi where you know, hey, like Even though you don't. These aren't your direct employees. They you have to influence. And you mentioned, um, finding ways to provide feedback. Right. In terms of any kind of customer service, uh, experience people are having you touched on, like a reward ceremony or recognition. Tell us any other examples, like what are some of the ways you kind of lead this ex equals CX kind of that through that influence strategy when it comes to recognition, these types of feedback loops. Would love to hear any more examples on that.

Speaker C: So honest to goodness, it's the stuff you think about that you do for your own people. We, um, at this airport will do. During the summer, we'll do, you know, thank you days for our extended employee population, um, where we'll set up tables and we'll just provide, you know, waters or snacks. Uh, we do the, what we call the excellence awards at the airport. You know, we rent out a hotel. We again, in partnership. If you. That these are for non employees in partnership with their employer, um, we will set up a nomination process. So through mystery shopping, we get a lot of feedback and then we sit down with the employer and we identify people who have received recognition from passengers, from peers, and then we do awards and we will usually fund part of it and their employer will fund part of it because we do think it's a partnership. And John, you're exactly right. And we just very, very strongly believe, um, if we treat our employees the right way and we show them what it means to value them, to appreciate them, to recognize them, to support them when things in their life maybe aren't going as they had planned, and they feel like we're a extended workplace family, they're going to really treat our passengers, um, the way that they're being treated by the employer and our customers as an airport could be going on the most wonderful vacation that they've saved for forever. Could be a business trip, it could be a funeral, could be seeing a sick family member. There's so many different life experiences that we want our employees to be sensitized to, understanding that we've taken care of them in all circumstances and they need to be sensitive to our passengers and deliver that same level of service we've delivered to them.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that additional background or just that, that, you know, just the experience there, um, emerging, the partnership, you know, that you, you live out with your partners and, and the extended employees. So. Okay, so this is wonderful, Margie, thank you again. I'm, you know, final question. I want to really kind of look to the future. Right. So as you, it's crazy to say we're you know, talking about wrapping up 2026, looking at 2027, you know, for our audience. What are some of the, you know, the most uh, the biggest priorities that you're starting to, you know, start to focus in on or what you're looking at, um, as ah, some of your strategic pillars, as you kind of start looking at planning for, you know, the upcoming year. What are some of the things that our audience HR leaders should be aware of?

Speaker C: Yeah, so organizationally, hopefully everybody knows we've got a 12 and a half billion dollar construction project to grow the airport. Um, we're going to hit 100 million passengers before 2030. And so with that, while yes, it's positive to the community and positive to the airport, it also has an effect on our employees. And so we, when I joined we had uh, from, from, I'm going to talk HR for a moment from an HR perspective. We had um, Quite Old Systems, 23 year old PeopleSoft, uh, that we hadn't been able to modify or adjust for a while, um, which led us to outdated and manual processes. I um, mentioned at the beginning that we'd hired a C level employee to help us with innovation and transformation, digitization. And now AI, that really and truly is where our focus is in all things on the airport side. We all know as passengers that AI has been used for a while. There is the identification you now have for those that have TSA touches, watchless, you just kind of go through. There's an AI component now there's many other examples of that in the airport, but in all the other areas of our business, particularly back office, we've been quite slow to get to where we want to be. But we're accelerating and so we changed. We recently converted to workday. We finished our implementation, our second round in February. The hope with that implementation was to teach every employee at their fingertips how things can, can be better, how they can be digitized, automated self service, which is something we did not have really before. Um, and that's kind of that step one of change management. We are now accelerating to trying to find ways. We've got some agents in place, we've got two really cool examples as an airport, um, I'll share one of them. But with all of this construction we have going on, for those people that get frustrated with terminal C at times, um, when things get backed up and it takes a while to drive through, we actually have built an AI powered engine that takes lots of insights and Data from airlines, from ways, um, from other sources that we get as an airport. We've got cameras all over this airport, all over. Like, we know when people are entering our airport, you know, if there's any type of criminal stuff going on. Like, it's really, it's pretty sophisticated. We get to find out ahead of a delay, a road delay. We now know what it is. We can deploy police officers before it ever gets backed up. We can deploy our customer service agents. Well, people need to work differently when they're introduced to this new tech. They have to learn to trust the data and not revert back to the old ways of checking in with seven or 10 systems to get what they need. But to know how not only to use the tech, but how to build new tech like that, how to solve new problems with similar types of methodologies. And so we have really ramped up. We've recently hired. We didn't have any change management before we hired a change management leader. We're hiring another one this year and we're truly ramping up, uh, the change management support for all of our projects so that we could also signal what new skills do we need, how do we train and retrain? Because we do not believe in laying people off, unlike private sector. That's one of the benefits of being here. We believe in reskilling, retooling, and redeploying our talent.

Speaker B: Got it, Got it. Okay. This has been wonderful. Uh, Maruchi, thank you again for just being willing to share, you know, your insights and, uh, navigating these challenges coming from private now in public and kind of the hybrid, you know, balance you're finding. So very, very much appreciate you being willing to share. As we wrap up today, remember this. The insights you've gained are only as valuable as the action you take. Leadership and culture transformation start with each of us. At ITA Group, we help people and brands thrive together because creating a workplace where people feel seen, valued and inspired is how we drive meaningful change. For more strategies, tools and insights to help you lead with purpose and build people first organizations, visit itagroup.com insights thank you for joining us. And until next time, keep leading with your heart and making a difference as a, uh, People first leader worth following.

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