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When customers demand services delivered in a more timely and seamless way, organizations often must overcome functional boundaries to meet the challenge. Created by differences of expertise and status, and often by the systems put into place to manage performance, functional boundaries are not easily overcome.
This article takes a close look at cross-functional coordination of the departure process at Southwest Airlines to discover how managers can make well-integrated service delivery a reality. Southwest's service quality ratings are as high as or higher than those of its competitors, while turning planes faster and with fewer staff, even after making allowance for its simpler approach to airline travel. To achieve these outcomes, Southwest draws upon well-established customer service concepts for managing front-line customer service providers. Southwest is well–acquainted with the concept that highly satisfied service providers help to create highly satisfied customers.
But that's only part of the story. Although customer service managers tend to focus their attention on the interface between service providers and the customer, that's not the only interface that's critical to the overall service experience. Excellent service also depends upon the interactions among the employees—among all of those people who are engaged in producing and delivering the service, whether or not they interface directly with the customer. Many of these interactions are partially or fully hidden behind the scenes in the typical service experience, but their results are often all too apparent to the customer.
This article reveals what happens behind the scenes at Southwest to produce an effective service experience, identifying organizational practices with strong—sometimes unexpected—impacts on coordination. Whether they're operating in restaurant, hotel, healthcare, or other service settings, customer service managers can identify employee interactions that are critical to service excellence and then design organizational practices to support them. Though the story is set in the airline industry, its lessons are relevant wherever multiple functional groups must interact in a timely, seamless way to deliver excellent service.
(NOTE: The following excerpted section from "Coordinating Services Across Functional Boundaries" looks at control mechanisms, one of several organizational practices identified in the article which, when properly designed, improve cross-functional coordination).
Control Mechanisms
How are employee actions aligned with organizational goals?
This is the job of control mechanisms.
A major preoccupation when managing the airline departure process is assigning responsibility for delays. Typically, a single department must ultimately be held responsible for each delay, unless the cause can reasonable be ascribed to weather or other nonhuman factors. This approach, called functional accountability, is designed to prevent carelessness and to ensure that people will be held accountable for their mistakes.
The unfortunate outcome, according to findings from this study, is that fingerpointing prevails and time is spend unproductively assigning blame for delays. "What usually happens is a communication breakdown, but we have no code for that," said a ramp supervisor at American. "If you ask anyone here, what's the last thing you think of when there's a problem? I bet your bottom dollar it's the customer. And these are guys who bust their butts every day. But they're thinking, ‘How do I keep my ass out of the sling?'" At other airlines, people reported holding back from helping when a delay appeared imminent, since helping might make them appear to be responsible for causing the delay.
Southwest has tried to overcome this problem by creating a team delay. "The team delay is used to point out problems between two or three different employee groups in working together," said the vice president of operations. "If you see everybody working as a team and it's a team problem, you call it a team delay. It's been a very positive thing." With the team delay, there's always the possibility of taking joint responsibility for a delay, when in fact the problem appears to go beyond the failures of a single functional group.
It's not surprising to most people that shared accountability across functions has a positive effect on cross-functional coordination and on the performance of processes that rely on cross-functional coordination. There remain the questions, however, of why it's been so difficult for most airlines to institute shared accountability for delays when it appears quite sensible.
Southwest Airlines employees are involved in a profit-sharing program and United Airlines adopted a team delay when it instituted employee ownership: these two cases would suggest that perhaps shared monetary incentives are the secret to making shared accountability effective. But American Airlines has had profit-sharing programs for its employees since 1989, and yet it's perhaps the most adamant about sticking with strict functional accountability. When an American station manager tried to move to a shared accountability system, he was told that the station would still have to report to headquarters the single department deemed responsible for each delay, thus undermining the credibility of the local innovation.
What's more surprising, perhaps, is the effect of supervision on cross-functional coordination. High ratios of supervisors to front-line employees where linked in this study to strong departure process performance.
This is unusual in the airline industry: most airlines, particularly American and United, had been moving aggressively toward lower levels of supervision, in the name of cost-cutting and empowerment. In some sites, they had moved to levels as low as 2.4 supervisors per 100 front-line employees, for a span of control of about 40. One negative side-effect identified by this study was that supervisors had only the time to focus on the "bad apples" and little time to give useful feedback to the large majority of their direct reports. Yet in processes that are highly interdependent, more feedback is needed, so each employee can interpret the effects of his or her actions on overall process outcomes.
Southwest has dramatically higher levels of supervision than other airlines—more than 10 supervisors per 100 front-line employees, for a span of control of about 10. This higher level of supervision has not only increased the potential for useful feedback but, by making the managers more available, has served to increase the flow of information in the other direction as well. Higher levels of supervision also make it more probable that any given front-line employee can reasonably aspire to a management position, particularly in an airline like Southwest, which is dedicated to promotion from within.
Bottom Line
Shared accountability improves cross-functional coordination.
That may seem obvious, but implementation of the ideas may be
hindered by the fear that managerial control will be compromised.
High levels of supervision, in the context of an organization
that emphasizes the feedback or coaching function of supervisors,
also boosts cross-functional coordination.
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