Over the four years since the Covid pandemic, many changes have impacted businesses, with perhaps the most radical being the work-from-home paradigm. How businesses continue to respond to this dynamic was one of the topics discussed in an industry leadership panel on Wednesday at the JetNet iQ Summit in New York City.
“We absolutely had to learn to be a little more flexible and accommodating…and like many manufacturers, the key was keeping our factory running and making sure the people who worked in the factory were safe,” explained Jeannine Haas, Gulfstream Aerospace’s chief marketing officer, adding that it then evaluated the corporate roles that could work from home. “A few things were lost trying to communicate over the screen; it’s just not quite the same, so we really do appreciate the in-person time.”
Since then, the company has swung back to more of an in-the-office mode but with more flexibility. “It’s never sort of all the way to one side or all the way to the other; it sort of comes back to the middle and that’s where I think we are right now.”
Paul Sislian, executive v-p of aftermarket services and strategy with Bombardier, noted that while his company was able to successfully weather the work-from-home situation, the topic “is a huge debate at Bombardier right now,” with a discussion of why a return to in-office was necessary.
“The question becomes if we were performing, why do we have to go back to traditional methods?” he said. “We have gained an amazing amount of goodwill with our employees because people will say, 'I want to work here because you are flexible.'”
However, Sislian noted that there are drawbacks. “I firmly believe that there is an aspect of the culture that we are losing, and it’s not with the people that have been at the company like me for 20 to 25 years.” He explained how his daughter is now the third generation of the family to work for the Montreal-based airframer, starting in the aftermath of Covid.
“Her view of the culture of our company—in my view—is completely different because she sees it through the lens of [working] from home, and she has not been immersed in the Bombardier culture where there are 18,000 people in the city that work in the office. I’m worried about how the next generation is going to evolve the culture of our company from where it is today to where it will be tomorrow.”
Melvyn Heard, GE Aerospace’s general manager for business aviation, explained that his company has seen an unexpected benefit from the years of remote conference calls. “We used to not appreciate the global teams that are out there that had to deal with all these remote calls in the middle of the night. Now when everybody coming out of Covid was on a remote call, you really had to make sure that everybody was engaged; you had the cameras on to make sure people were focused on the meeting.
“It really cleaned up a lot of our meetings, actually making sure we had deeper engagement, and inclusion of folks in our global teams, so those were hidden benefits coming of this and huge dividends we’re facing right now.”
Moderator John King, president of Solairus Aviation, added that the work-from-home dynamic creates more of a demand on leaders than when you could just bump into somebody at the water cooler. “It’s a leadership challenge these days,” he said.