AIN’s Winter 2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit (CALS) brought together business aviation thought leaders to examine and discuss some of our industry’s pressing issues. The session’s topics included generational differences, employee retention, maintenance, training, hiring/DEI, legal concerns, compensation, and sustainability.
As if multiple aircraft types, multiple work schedules, and multiple locations weren’t enough to stress out even the most organized managers, today, you must add in the challenge of dealing with multigenerational workforces.
The CALS attendees identified four critical aspects of multigenerational workforces that flight department leaders are addressing today: clear communications, individual motivations, creating value-added plans, and relationship building.
It’s Not What You Say but How You Say It
Today’s typical flight department is a mix of generations, and each has its own preferred way of communicating. As a refresher, Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, Gen Xers from 1965 to 1980, Millennials from 1981 to 1996, and Gen Zers post-1997.
One of the communication issues managers face when dealing with the younger employees is their preference for texting or emailing rather than having a phone conversation. While that may work for inter-team communications, it’s not the best avenue for customer interactions.
“A lot of people in aviation tend to do business with people they like, and that seems to have gotten lost a bit today,” an MRO’s manager says. “You can’t text somebody you don’t know and expect the conversation to go anywhere. It’s fine for some things but not for the relationship as a whole.”
Another issue attendees found common among younger-generation employees is that with emails in particular, they often appear unprofessional due to their excessive use of abbreviations, incorrect grammar, and poor punctuation and spelling.
One way to remedy the situation is for the flight department’s leaders to set clear expectations and provide guidelines for acceptable written and verbal communication.
“We addressed the issue by instating company policies about proper email etiquette, especially in client-facing communications,” a senior MRO manager says. “It seems to be working.”
Mastering the Art of Motivation
As with communications, multigenerational team members are motivated by many different things. And again, knowing the differences is crucial to achieving hangar harmony.
“Getting to know each employee’s values, what motivates them, and what they need is key to fostering a healthy and inclusive work environment,” explains the president of a large MRO. “It also helps people feel valued and safe, which helps with productivity and longevity.”
With regard to motivation, generally speaking, the younger generation has a broader spectrum of things that drive them than, say, Baby Boomers.
As one OEM marketing director says, “The old way was we lived to work. Your job was your life. The new way is that you work eight hours and then go home and have your real life. And you don’t take your work home with you.”
Another generational difference is each generation’s perception of “why” something is done the way it is.
“Gen Xers and Millennials are not big on ‘doing something this way just because.’ They’re focused on why it’s done that way,” says an MROs sales director. “I think everyone is moving more and more toward managing the results rather than the processes.”
The bottom line to it all, as a corporate flight department’s director states, is, “We’re all different, and I think as a corporation and an industry, we need to embrace that. You’ve got to ask the question and see what a person needs and what’s really going to motivate them.”
The Value of Clearly Defining Goals
Now that you know what motivates your team members, the next step is creating a clear and workable plan—something that business aviation hasn’t been good at doing.
“One thing I have not seen done well on the corporate side is the layout of a plan for someone’s career path,” explains a corporate pilot. “Those guys in the airlines—whether they’re pilots, dispatch, mechanics, or whatever—know exactly where they’re going from day one.”
An upward career path may be attractive to one person but not another, though. That’s been identified as another generational differentiator.
“I think that in the past, older-generation people thought, ‘If I work hard, I can get somewhere and do better,” the CEO of a charter operator says. “While the younger generation are thinking, ‘You know what? Here isn’t so bad. If I can enjoy my life and am comfortable, why do I need to put in the extra work?’
That work-isn’t-everything life philosophy is becoming more prevalent in business aviation today, as the head of a major corporate flight department adds. “I think a lot of times, upward mobility comes with the added burden of people leadership,” says this person. “And that responsibility is something that some aren’t necessarily wanting to take on.”
Strong Relationships Make Strong Teams
When you talk about “relationships” in business, you’re talking about two different things: how a people perceive their work and how they interact with others.
The MRO president states that employees’ relationship with their job has undergone a seismic shift in the past few decades.
“I think the younger generation has learned that they can move up faster by just hopping around from place to place today, whereas in my generation [Baby Boomers], you’d find a job and stay there for as long as you can,” he says. “From what I see, that kind of thinking is gone.”
That job-hopping mentality has put more strain on flight departments and MROs, which must keep their people as happy as possible so they will stay longer. That’s where the personal relationship side comes in.
“When it comes to building those relationships, leaders need to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all approach,” a flight department manager adds. “But one popular approach is through understanding a person’s ‘love language.’”
Made popular by Gary Chapman’s 1992 book The Five Languages of Love, it is today’s generational way of identifying and communicating how they want to feel appreciated. But as one CALS attendee stresses, “We can’t go through all five languages with every employee all the time.
“We can’t have a pizza party and tell them how good they are doing and spend quality time with them,” he continues. “So maybe just set out in a work environment and say, ‘This is how we show appreciation up front.’ Then when pizza or quarterly review hits, they know it means they’re doing a good job.”