United Airlines on soaring to EX success through continuous listening

When you’re an $55 billion-revenue airline and you’ve got 100,000 employees distributed across six continents, it is very hard to keep in touch with them, and to know whether or not they’re happy and engaged.

That’s why United Airlines decided to switch up its employee listening program, with the help of Qualtrics.

Speaking to UNLEASH at Qualtrics X4 in Salt Lake City, Michelle McCrackin, Director of Talent Development and Talent Strategy at United Airlines, shares: “We have been a customer experience customer of Qualtrics for some time.

“We were getting this constant, always-on feedback from customers, but we weren’t getting it from our employees.”

The HR team wanted to access to real-time, current data so they could take faster and data-based decision and actions – frankly, one annual survey was just not cutting it.

Continuous listening at United Airlines

Rather than relying on one survey a year, United Airlines decided to use Qualtrics’ employee experience (EX) tools to survey its employees every month.

It’s not that every employee would get the survey monthly – they would only answer the questions once a year as they did before – but a random sample would get asked the questions every month, thereby ensuring “the data wasn’t stale, and we constantly had new data that was coming in”, McCrackin tells UNLEASH.

This continuous listening approach, as McCrackin shared during a breakout session at Qualtrics X4, meant that employees did not get survey fatigue.

It also ensured that the HR team was getting high-level, big picture data, but could also really focus in on “things that need immediate response”.

A hypothetical example that McCrackin shares is that the printer on Gate D20 in Salt Lake City airport is broken, an employee shares that information, and then United Airlines can get the printer fixed immediately.

This quick action shows employees that the organization is listening to their concerns.

Employees had complained that “I filled this survey for the last three years, no-one’s ever done anything with the data, how do I know you’re gong to do something now? So being able to show you said it, we did it, over and over again, is what builds trust and credibility over time”, adds McCrackin.

Michelle McCrackin, Director of Talent Development and Talent Strategy, United Airlines.

All of this additional data is ultimately not just good for EX, but also customer experience (CX).

By having EX and CX surveys on one platform, United Airlines has been able to “marry those two data together to understand that when x happens with the customer, what’s happening with our employees at the same time?”

Interestingly, McCrackin shares that a major piece of feedback from the continuous listening approach was employees asking how they can drive up customer experiences.

As frontline employees, they were really committed to improving so they could “pay it forward to the customer”.

HR having a seat at the table on EX

As McCrackin shared at Qualtrics X4, giving the HR team access to more and better data was essential to giving “HR even more of a seat at the table” in answering those bigger, top-level challenges that employees were raising in the survey.

At the end of the day, a successful talent strategy needs data.

To empower the wider business with this HR data, McCrackin’s team created “dynamic dashboards” for leaders to look at each month and see how the data is changing.

However, there has been a challenge of trying to get leaders to not to be too overreactive and over pivoting based on dramatically different scores month on month – yes, they can fix the quick issues, but “we still need them to look at a holistic view” and the overall score.

“It’s about teaching them to be dynamic, and to look at it from both lenses”, McCrackin tells UNLEASH.

The secret to success here has been United Airlines’ HR Business Partners (HRBPs)– they connect HR to the “heart and soul of the organization”, and they’ve been essential to that leadership mindset change.

In addition, the HR team has also brought leadership on board by asking them what questions they want to ask employees, and then adding that into the survey itself.

For McCrackin, success doesn’t come from just asking HR-y questions, but on driving higher employee engagement at United Airlines.

AI and the future of EX at United Airlines

Qualtrics is betting big on AI – in fact, automation was a major theme of the entire X4 show.

In an exclusive UNLEASH interview, Qualtrics’ President of Product and Engineering Brad Anderson shares that “every leader wants to talk about AI”, and they’re “trying to understand what is AI hype, what is product truth”.

Zig Serafin, Qualtrics CEO, shared in his keynote that AI will give leaders “more time to carry out mission critical work”, and make better decisions, while OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati (who also took to the Qualtrics X4 stage) shared that there’s still so much potential for AI, and particularly generative AI to transform the world for the better.

UNLEASH was keen to find out United Airline’s approach to AI.

For McCrackin, “there’s a lot of risk with AI”, so “we want to make sure that we are not jumping in too quick”. So, the airline is thinking carefully about use cases around AI.

In terms of Qualtrics and AI, McCrackin shares that the HR tech giant has made huge progress in this space, and one example is in the realm of survey comments.

“Comments is one the hardest things to wrap your arms around when you’re going through surveys – it can be all over the place, it can be hard to decipher”, but “Qualtrics has put a lot of steps in place to make sure that we’re able to get good insights out of these comments”.

United Airlines is really excited about its EX journey – using Qualtrics has already led to higher survey uptake rate than in the past, this is despite the challenge of ensuring employees know that it is their month to take the survey.

However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t tweaks to be made.

Top of the airline’s EX to-do list looking ahead is device integration.

Currently the survey is shared via email, but the gold standard would be having a ping on workers’ United Airlines device so they can take the survey wherever they are (even while they are up in the air).