Inside Out Culture

Aviation Culture with Cate Bichara

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 33

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In this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we talk to Cate Bichara, co-author of a recent culture paper about the aviation industry.

Key topics covered include:

  • Is there a balance between psychological and physical safety?
  • Why do you believe that the aviation industry has been slow to recognise the importance of culture?
  • Are there more Boeing case studies out there?

Connect with Cate:

Cate Bichara

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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.

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Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis.

Cath:

And I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think.

Cath:

Welcome to another episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast, and it's another of our guest episodes, and so I'm going to hand straight over to Colin to introduce our guest today.

Colin:

Thank you, Cath. Yes, I'm delighted to be joined today by Kate Bashar. Now, kate has been working in the aviation industry for over 20 years. She's a holder, amongst other things, of a Master in Social and Educational Sciences, has been involved in many aspects of training, particularly in the field of air traffic control. She's also a speaker, an independent consultant, and she co-authored a fascinating paper on changing the culture within the aviation industry, which we'll be talking to her about today. Hello, kate, thanks for joining us.

Cate:

Good afternoon to both of you. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Colin:

So let's start with the paper, because that's how I came across your work, as someone who is kind of constantly looking at Cath, always talking about the work that we do to dig into what's happening into the world, around the world of culture, and I came across your paper, which is called, which you co-authored, called positive organizational culture in aviation, and we'll put a link to the the paper into this, the action sheet. One of the the the of the statements that immediately grabbed my attention was the aviation industry faces challenges stemming from a lack of attention to organization culture beyond safety culture. So maybe you can just give us a little bit of a genesis of where did your thinking come from, where did the paper come from? You know kind of what has been the response to it.

Cate:

Thanks, colin.

Cate:

Yes, so we have an aviation what is known as Just Culture, which is embedded, amongst other places, in the European regulation, which actually mandates front end operators pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance staff to report incidents, so that we can create a learning culture within the aviation industry that will actually help us avoid accidents and not just learn from accidents that have passed. And my thinking here was in fact, it was for another master's that I did more recently. I wrote a paper on this, trying to move it into the office environment, with the hypothesis that office people have just as much impact on safety as the front end operator does. It just is maybe not less, it's maybe a little less visible, a little less immediate, and indeed so then we went on with my two co-authors to co-author a paper that's on LinkedIn, and then this positive organizational culture, which we are trying to promote at least across Europe, believing that a positive organizational culture and a high reliability industry, a safety critical industry, is fundamental to ensuring safety for everybody. It's not just the people that you see at the front end.

Cath:

So one of the things that I've kind of associate with the aviation industry is this yeah, the beginnings of the just culture where we think of actually aviation being really ahead of the curve. And you know, pilots flagging near misses, the black box giving us that tool of learning. Pilots are flagging near misses, the black box giving us that tool of learning. And Matthew Syed's written a book, black Box Thinking, which I think lots of us have kind of read and thought about how there's a big contrast between aviation approach to safety and healthcare, where the front end perhaps don't well, don't record near misses and haven't got the same record over the last century of improving outcomes for people involved. What you're saying is behind the pilots, behind the cockpit. Not nearly enough has been done to make sure that the same principles apply.

Cate:

So I wouldn't be able to really speak about the healthcare industry other than I mean, I've got no statistics to hand. Obviously, it's less catastrophic when something goes wrong in the healthcare industry. If an aircraft crashes, it hits the headlines, everybody knows about it. It's a lot of people involved. The healthcare industry tends to be one person at a time, so it's a little bit more sort of scope creep, I would say. Having said that, and to come back to your question, is yes, there's a lot that happens in the aviation industry.

Cate:

Behind the people that we see, the people that we as flying public see, are the pilots we at least know about them because they're up front the cabin crew, who also have a big safety role to play, and that is sometimes overlooked. We tend to see them as some glorified waiters, but they're not. They're definitely first and foremost, they're for the safety of the passenger. But then there are the other people that we don't see. There are the aircraft mechanics, there are the people who refuel, there are the baggage handlers, the air traffic controllers. We sometimes think about them, and that is still just the tip of the iceberg, because behind that we've got all the people who are creating the procedures, who are looking at the documents, who are applying the regulations, who are working within the realms of safety to ensure that everything that goes out there and actually makes the aircraft fly is safe and as safe as possible.

Cate:

And here may be another point to bring. That is important is and to come back to my first point on this question is that aviation has become safe because if anything goes wrong, it is very visible and therefore there are very few things that we can learn about that have actually happened in the past. We really need to look at what is going to happen in the future. And how do we look at what is happening in the future? What will happen in the future is to take the weak signals, to take the things that could have gone wrong and look at those so that we can better the safety before something happens. So it's not quite a crystal ball, but we're working on it.

Cath:

Is there a kind of snobbery that you know we care about the frontline people. They've got to get it right but we're ignoring these. How have we got to a position where these other really important people working in the industry, their culture, has been neglected? People working in the industry have their cultures been neglected.

Cate:

So I think there is a public perception that the really important person is, first and foremost, the pilot, and they are. They're definitely very, very important. We like having them there and the air traffic controller, because they keep the aircraft apart. When we dig down again, we're thinking of the maintenance people. We like them because they keep the aircraft safe to fly and bits of it aren't going to fall off. People who do the baggage handling, who load the plane, who put the fuel on board. As we start thinking more and more about these people, we start realizing how important they are. The fuel needs to be the right amount, otherwise the aircraft could crash, either because it doesn't have enough fuel for the flight or because it's got too much and can't take off. That's not good. The luggage has to be put in the aircraft according to its weight so that the aircraft balances out, because an aircraft is a balancing act in the air. So all of these people are very important. They need to know what they're doing. They need to follow process and procedure. So all of these people are very important. They need to know what they're doing. They need to follow process and procedure.

Cate:

The perception, the public perception, is that possibly the person doing something obscure in an office like writing out a procedure. We don't necessarily understand the impact that that could have. The image that I take from the first paper that we wrote is of a hospital, and here I'm going back to the healthcare hospital in the UK that was built. When they put out the call for tender, they made a mistake in a copy-paste in an Excel spreadsheet and one of the companies who put in a tender identified this error, said we will be more expensive because we've corrected the error. For whatever reasons and I've only got the BBC article on this so I cannot delve into more detail it was decided to go with another company into more detail. It was decided to go with another company. They booked the hospital to the specifications on the Excel spreadsheet and then the error was noticed, luckily before the patients arrived, so there were no issues or deaths due to that. However, it cost the hospital an awful lot of money to correct it.

Cate:

Now, this is not somebody who was a front-end operator, it's not a doctor, it's not a nurse, it's not even the cleaning staff. It's somebody who is sitting in an office and copy-pasting something from somewhere into something else. The difference here between the front-end operator and the office staff or the back-end operator, I would say is the time lapse. When a pilot does something wrong or an air traffic controller does something wrong, we usually see it very fast and so it can be corrected very fast. It has to be seen and then corrected when it's in the office. It could take six months, it could take a year, it could take two years to come to the surface, and then are we able to even trace it back to what went wrong? I'm not saying the person, because this is not about blaming. This is about finding out what went wrong so that we can learn from it. But can we even trace it back to what went wrong, or is it lost in the mists of time, and this makes it a little more difficult as well.

Colin:

Yeah, one of the things that because back in episode eight of Inside Out Culture Podcast, we, Cath and I, talked about Boeing and the challenges that it was facing at the time and this is a perfect example of everything that you talked about in the paper as well is, you know, boeing got to the state that they were in.

Colin:

Obviously, they had the issues over the 737 MAX plane, the delays, the cut in the corners, but it all comes back to everything that you're talking about, Kate, in terms of the different people in the different roles and really the management focus on building something that people feel a sense of connection to, people, feel a sense of ownership to people feel in a sense of pride about. There was an Emirates pilot last year in the media, basically, basically, who said that the aviation culture almost is like a race to the bottom. And so how do you feel, or what do you think in terms of how we got to this point where we haven't paid attention to the back office as much as the front office had, and by front office, obviously, I mean pilots.

Cate:

Yeah, pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance who we're referring to here, at least according to the European regulation. I won't go into too much detail about that. So I think that first of all, there is safety. Creating safety is creating a lack of something, and it's very difficult to measure your return on investment. So you're investing in something that you want to not happen, which means that selling that to people who do not have a safety mindset and here I'm thinking of investors, shareholders, boards of directors we can always hope that senior management will understand safety in a safety critical environment, but there are other people, particularly in cost benefit driven environments, where the shareholders aren't necessarily going to understand why a company will be spending money on something that is actually a non-existence. So already selling this is very difficult. So what happens is then you write regulation, regulatory requirements, standards, best practices all of these exist and you go for, I would say, the minimum viable product, because that's what's going to cost the least with the best return on investment, and this is the easiest thing to sell to these people who do not have the absolute safety mindset. And then to push that further, we would need more regulation or more standards or other drivers that create the necessity.

Cate:

Businesses don't do things because it's a nice to have. They do things because there's a return on investment I'm talking about for-profit businesses, of course. So they need to see a reason to go and spend money, and I understand that, because they've got a responsibility towards their owners, towards their shareholders and towards people who have invested in them. What people don't see is how much it costs to actually have an incident or an accident. And here, learning from the weak signals, learning from the things that will indicate that if anything goes wrong again, or too many times that way, or gets a bit worse or drifts slightly from where it is, is going to create that catastrophic event, is very difficult to say. Well, what's the risk? We'll manage a risk. Probability is so much, and businesses work like this. They say what's our risk? We're insured against the risk. How much is it going to cost us? What is it reputationally?

Cate:

We do have now, certainly in Europe, the CSR, esg regulations that are supportive of this, but they're across all the industries corporate social responsibility, which drives a certain amount of, I would say, positive organizational culture. Is it enough? Personally, I don't think so. I think that there's a lot more that can be done. I think that there is also a lack of understanding of what really can be done in an organization.

Cate:

And again, very often top management will, when they see the importance and understand the importance of a positive organizational culture, or what we can also call psychological safety in the organization. And here it's not a unicorn, it's not something fluffy, this is something that has been studied for many years, came out in the 1990s Amy Edmondson, timothy Clark, et cetera. So when top management understands the need for safety, they possibly understand the need for positive organizational culture or psychological safety, they understand the need for their assayed inclusion and diversity, and then they go and tell their reports, go, do, make it happen. The big thing that I've identified here is that we're completely missing the point here because they're also telling those direct reports that middle management and the lower echelons to also meet their KPIs, to also save money, et cetera, et cetera. So where do I put the focus?

Cate:

As a middle manager, I will put my focus on what I know how to do, which is meeting my KPIs, which is doing my day job, and there's other fluffy stuff that I don't know how to do because nobody's taught me.

Cate:

I then put to the side and I'll do it one day when I've got a bit of time, because it's actually not something that I feel very comfortable with and I don't really understand it. And here there is a big educational piece that a lot of companies not only in aviation piece that a lot of companies not only in aviation but across the board, could really benefit from by supporting and helping their middle management, actually number one understand what it is that we're looking for, but also how to achieve it. And another thing that we see is that the issues and the topics are very, very similar across all industries. Once we've moved away from the safety criticality, in other words, the immediate response to safety, we find ourselves in industries and I'm thinking companies that build or install lifts, you know, the automotive industry, the food and beverage industry. They all actually have safety components to them and they all actually could benefit very much or do benefit from a positive organisational culture.

Cath:

I mean there's also a cost of having disengaged staff, having a high turnover, having a sense that you don't belong to an organisation, which is all part of what then pulls at the quality of safety that you're able belong to an organization, which is all part of what then pulls at the quality of safety that you're able to contribute to in your role. And this is one of the things that I think you start to really look at the paper. What do people need in order to thrive and deliver safety, but in a sustainable way? And I mean what's coming through loud and clear to me is a lack of leadership. Leadership at the top, actually, not you know, but just chucking down all KPIs and positive culture. Of course that's not enough.

Cath:

Lack of learning and development Actually, we need leadership in the middle management layer as well. But perhaps you could dive into a little bit. I love we both loved how you sort of brought out these aspects of you know our fundamental human sort of brought out these aspects of you know our fundamental human needs, the importance of values. Yeah, give us a sense of what your paper sort of really dives into that is needed, you know, throughout organisations, at all levels.

Cate:

Yeah, absolutely, and so I've been talking a lot about the safety impact of a positive organisational culture. What we need to look at is the individual feeling comfortable, feeling that they belong to the organization, that they can thrive, they can develop and they can give the best of themselves. Without that, people will be hiding things, they'll be hiding things about themselves, they'll be hiding things about the work they've done, the mistakes they've made, what they're actually doing at work, and then we get this disengagement and a risk of safety. So the link is there. I think that what's important.

Cate:

One can take Maslow's hierarchy of needs and we go to work because we've got to pay the bills, I've got to put food on the table, pay my mortgage, likewise, I think, most of the world, and so that's really the bottom. But how are we going to actually create this environment within which we're working in a high-technology, high-reliability organisation? We can't remain just at the bottom. We're not with all due respect to people who do it, but we're not just digging holes or doing something that has no further impact. We are thinkers, we are people who need to move with the times, work with the technology, work with the technology, work with the new cultures, work with whatever's happening in the world at the moment AI drones, whatever we want to look at, and so we can't just stay right at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. We really need to move up towards the top and we need people to feel engaged, feel that they can come and bring their whole self to work. That's one side of it. The other side of it is the OECD is predicting that there will be, if I'm not mistaken, something like 38 million people missing from the workforce by 2050. By 2050. This is not just from aviation, it's across the board, and possibly my number is wrong, but it's an enormous amount of people, simply because there is no demographic. Well, there is demographic growth rate, but people are getting older and the working age population from 15 to 64 is decreasing, and this is going to create another problem. Industries are going to be competing with each other to actually get talent and retain talent.

Cate:

With the digitalization of the workplace, people have more transferable skills. A data analyst can go and work for a Formula One team, for an aviation company, for a bank just as easily, or for an insurance, for a bank just as easily, or for an insurance, and they're going to be looking at where they feel most comfortable. Just throwing more money at them may not actually do it in the end. So how do we not only attract but also retain our talent, and how do we make sure that that talent can then provide the best of themselves in the workplace, so that we don't need two people doing the job of one?

Cate:

And there again, if we've got less people, we're going to have to maximize people, but maximizing what people can do is not about making them work longer hours. It's not about making them do more. It's about creating the environment within which they can actually thrive and be more performant themselves, and so it is beneficial to the company, I would say, in the short to medium term, to actually create this environment, although it's not again. It's just like safety, inclusion and diversity. Positive organizational culture is something that you don't see tangibly. You're not creating little boxes or nails or a number of spanners or screwdrivers.

Colin:

I think often, kate, one of the things that certainly we see in the corporate world is that if there's a crisis within an organization, often the answer is more process, it's more regulation, it's more regulation, it's more rules, which actually makes things worse, definitely in the short term, and my sense, especially with the aviation industry, is because everything is regulated so highly, we may think that's the answer.

Colin:

I mean, what the paper lays out really really clearly, which is something Cath and I always talk about, is the fact that if you put time, thought, effort, money into making sure people have got the skills to build great culture, then what you get behind the scenes is this real sense of pride, this willingness to do well, this willingness to work hard such that it contributes to the bottom line, which is something that the paper makes really, really clear. Is that, actually, if we do all of this stuff really really well, you know the output is, or the outcome is, business success. And the other thing I wanted to talk about there is it's not just you on your own, you're now part of a working group I think is it European working group to really look at how you educate and raise the importance of this at a more, I guess, regional level.

Cate:

Yes, so it is a global working group, a global task force, the Global Aviation and Aerospace Skills Task Force that is represented by, with all the continents on it. The GAST, as it's known, familiarly, is divided into five work streams. I'm co-leading, uh, one of the work streams, the work stream on workplace culture, because I do believe that it is so important. So there's something around. One of the work streams is around, uh, the added value of the value chain, or the added value of aviation. One is is on attraction how do we attract talent. Another one is on retention how do we retain talent. And the fifth one is on skills. And we're number four on the workplace culture, which kind of underpins all the others, because without the workplace culture in all of those work streams, the aviation industry is not going to be able to have this value attract, retain and develop their workforce.

Cath:

Yeah, it's the foundation, not the nice to have, isn't it? So there's some really clear themes coming out that we sort of talk about and use in our work around. Quality matters rather than quantity of work, need to think, and I think that's really increasingly critical in a world of AI. It's how can we best use that? Yeah, there's no answer, so we've got to create ever better answers. That needs us to think for ourselves and, yeah, an over-regulated or poorly led workplace people have stopped thinking for themselves, so that's always kind of going to be a huge risk going forward. I was also struck, actually, in the paper you distinguish between seeing you know, building trust as something administrative. It can't be that, and yet some people might see it as that and then it's not real versus you know a deeper culture, people's experience, and that requires these different skills. So what's the process for developing leaders? We've lost some leaders, perhaps from the aviation world. You mentioned also the impact of the pandemic that we're still recovering from. How do we get to build better leaders in aviation and beyond?

Cate:

Yes, and I think, kev, you're touching on something that's very important. This is not about virtue signaling. It's not about putting something, a nice sentence, on the internet and proclaiming that we do X, y or Z. I mean, it's great, if you do, that's absolutely fantastic. But people are sick and tired of the empty box where they're promised something and then they open the box and there's nothing inside it or there's something that really does not resemble what the packaging said it would. So the importance here of actually having a culture that really embeds these principles is fundamental to attracting and to retaining the skills and the talent that is needed in the industry and, I think, for any industry. In all honesty, what we're talking about here for aviation is true of any industry. And how to do that? Well, the how is always the difficult question.

Cate:

I would say, as I mentioned before, having the relevant tools in one's toolbox. As a leader, slash manager and even as an employee and even as, maybe, a graduate intern. All of these people need to know how they can go about this. What must I do? What can I do? When something looks good? How can I reinforce it? When something does not look good, how can I call it out what are the means to do that, and that has to be something that is company-led. There has to be something in place that allows people to function like that, and there also needs to be education people to function like that, and there also needs to be education. People need to understand the importance and how to do it and be given some means, and here the means are not necessarily a process. I mean processes and, believe me, processes are very important and I think regulation in itself is also very important to drive the right behaviors, as long as it's done properly and it's not just done for the sake of doing it. Um, so that there is something about outcomes-based regulation. I think that would probably be another, another conversation. Um, but, uh, here the tools can be coaching, they can be mentoring. Uh, they can be. Uh, they can be go-to people, they can be mentoring, they can be go-to people, they can be ambassadors.

Cate:

I don't think that here there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all, in as much as, although the themes, the topics and the issues are always pretty much exactly the same across the industry, when we boil it down to the essentials, the level of maturity of each individual will be very different and of each individual will be very different and so their needs will be very different at any point in time, and someone who doesn't understand this may actually need a full-blown.

Cate:

What is this and why are we doing it? Before we start the conversation on how do I get into it, whereas somebody else may be going. Well, I've got a really difficult situation here. Who can I turn to as a sounding board? Do I have a coach or a mentor who could help me through this with an external view? So there are different ways of doing it and that would be very much bespoke either to the company, possibly even to the team within the company that is facing those issues, and, of course, there is all the PR around it to make sure that it is understood, known and its importance is known and that people don't just brush it off as a nice to have. It's something that needs to get into the DNA of each organization.

Colin:

I think it's worth stating just as I wrap this up now, Kate, you know, and Cath and I have brought to light, you know, we've talked on a number of media stories and we focused on certain industries.

Colin:

It's just the level of great work that goes on within the industry and we're talking about aviation today, almost despite what's happening above and around, when I got on a plane which I do regularly I still have that sense of it being welcoming, I still feel safe. I'm always attentive during the safety instructions and you know, there's a real sense of pride in providing that service when actually often things behind really aren't that great and still, and yet, people come to work every single day with a smile on their face doing the work that they need to do to transport people around the world in a way that feels, you know, kind of welcoming and human. So I think we I think that should be celebrated whilst at the same time maintaining that focus which you guys are already doing on well, how do we improve things behind the scenes to make everybody's lives just a little bit happier?

Cate:

Yes, and I think it's. I wouldn't say that it's not. It's not good behind the scenes. I think you know aviation is the safest mode of transport, or one of the safest modes of transport, and that is very much thanks to the dedication of everybody working in it, because people enter aviation very often because there was a passion for it, they love it and they really want to make it work. And it's about enabling people to be able to do exactly that.

Cate:

That is the important part, Rather than blaming and turning around and saying you didn't do that or you did that wrong and therefore you will be punished. And this is the important part Rather than blaming and turning around and saying you didn't do that or you did that wrong and therefore you will be punished. And this is the fundamentals of just culture and a positive organizational culture, it's to say that went wrong, what can we fix in the system so that it doesn't go wrong again, and so what can we learn from this. And that is far more productive and it is far safer to behave like that than to say that went wrong. You were behind the wheel, so to speak, at that point in time. Therefore, it's your fault and we shall punish you, Because that is actually completely counterproductive. People are just going to hide anything that could be construed as a mistake that could be construed as a mistake.

Colin:

Okay, fabulous, it's been so great to talk to you, Kate. At the end of every episode, what we do is we have three things for people to do get curious about and uncover, so that people listening we like them to take that knowledge and apply it to the work that they're doing. I've captured a few things, Cath. I'm not sure if you've captured. Did you capture anything? What have you captured, Cath?

Cath:

Oh well, it was this piece around focusing on the quality of people's work, not quantity. So I like the idea we're going to maximise what get the most out of people. But most isn't a quantity thing, it's a quality thing, and I think if managers have a sense of how can I help people do better quality work the time they're here and not just add more things onto them, then that's a really big shift in where we're going to get to.

Colin:

Great, I've got that. So do focus on the quality and not the quantity of work. That's a really good one. I think, for people to get curious about is what steps is your industry taking to elevate the importance of culture? Kate here talked about the, the gas, the global team that's put together, which workplace culture is just one area. Cath and I have talked about sports and the shift in nature here, and so, yeah, really do get curious about that. And then the last thing to uncover, which is something that Kate said really early on, is whether your organization takes psychological safety as seriously as it does physical safety. Kay, it's been so great we might get you back on kind of this time. I don't know, maybe later in the year or maybe early 2026, if Cath and I have still got the energy to keep doing this, because I'd love to hear how the work stream goes, I'd love to hear the feedback that you get and you know, kind of what you're able to do.

Cate:

Well, thank you very much and thank you for inviting me. Thank you very much and thank you for inviting me, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Cath:

Fantastic Thanks, so much Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture.

Colin:

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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