We talk to Drew McMillan, leader of the global Colleague Communication & Culture function at British Airways - about the Covid-19 response of the world's favourite airline, pride in their people, what the future holds for travellers and an early career in Glaswegian coffee.
We talk to Drew McMillan, leader of the global Colleague Communication & Culture function at British Airways - about the Covid-19 response of the world's favourite airline, pride in their people, what the future holds for travellers, and an early career in Glaswegian coffee...
Introduction from Sam Bleazard
1mins15secs - Initial reaction to the pandemic and putting measures in place.
3minutes - Pride in keeping supply lines open and the sense of responsibility, in saying goodbye to, and repatriating people.
6mins45secs - British Airways people doing remarkable things.
9minutes - Creating dedicated channels of support.
12mins45secs - Drew on his Colleague and Culture role: 'Today I consider myself more of an HR professional.'
15mins45secs - Changes to the airline industry.
18mins - Early career, first job and lifelong love of coffee.
21mins45secs - Communication lessons and universal truths.
27mins30secs - What can we learn from the airline industry?
31minutes - Hobbies, side-hustles and Drew's unknown fact.
38mins30secs - Hopes for the future.
Hi, my name is Sam Bleazard. Welcome to Comms from the Shed, the interview show where you get to hear from a range of diverse and interesting voices on how they've coped during the global pandemic. In this series will be taking an informal look at life, talking to people who've been doing incredible things and asking them about their hopes for the future in both their personal and professional lives. Hope you enjoy it.
I'm delighted to say that with me today is Drew McMillan. Drew leads the global Communication & Culture function at British Airways, supporting people who are working 24/7 around the clock to connect Britain with the world and the world with Britain. So, going back to the start of the pandemic Drew, my own memories of this are that my boss at the time took a small a small, selected handful of us to one side and said, get your laptops because you're going to be part of a business continuity group, and we're just going to test something for a couple of weeks. And here we are 12 months later. What are your memories of that time, at the start of the pandemic?
Well, my memories are that it started as something fairly inconsequential, that we weren't terribly concerned about. You know, one of the things that the airlines are incredibly adept at is things happening around the world with very little notice. And I was adapting to them. It was a relatively benign situation whereby there might have been some localised outbreak in China that might or might not affect our flying schedule between Heathrow, Shanghai and Beijing, etcetera. I was being relatively calm about that. Clearly, the commercial team were already modelling what some of the impact might be on ticket revenues. And we were just making sure that we had the right things in place to make sure our crew were safe, when they were down route. All that kind of stuff. Nothing particularly troubling. And then it very quickly escalated, almost day by day to the point that I was having that conversation sometime in February I think it was, to us having another conversation in March when we were effectively sort of going into crisis mode. And here we are now, it's March 2021 and we haven't come out of crisis mode yet. So it's been a very strange time.
It has indeed. And what would you say you’re most proud of in terms of the response, not only from the business, but some of the things that you've touched and had responsibility for?
I think the thing I'm most proud of, in terms of British Airways, is that we have throughout this terrible, terrible time, managed to keep vital supply lines between the UK and the rest of the world open. Because although we're flying very few customers, we are flying a heck of a lot of cargo, and particularly in the early days of the crisis, when there wasn't enough PPE available in the UK - because the UK wasn't manufacturing much PPE - we were transporting hundreds of tons of vital PPE, ventilators and medicines, from around the world into the UK on our aircraft. So, in terms of the overall national response to the crisis, we played a really pivotal role in that. We're also the airline that had a very sad duty, and we continue to have a very sad duty, flying people out of the UK because their loved ones, unfortunately, somewhere in the world have passed away and they need to get back. If they're lucky, they can get back in time to say goodbye. But all too often we've been flying people back after a family member is deceased. Likewise we've been repatriating thousands of Brits who have been stuck for various periods of time outside the UK, and we've been bringing them back, with them often having not seen their loved ones for months and months. So we still play a vital role. I'm really, really proud of BA's role. In terms of what I'm proud of with my own team, it's that BA has taken more media interest during the crisis, particularly last year when we had to reshape our business quite radically. We took a huge amount of media and political flack for what we were having to do. Regardless of what your political stance on that is, my team ensured that our people were as informed as they possibly could be about why these very difficult changes were having to take place, and treated people with dignity and care. This was during what, for thousands of our people, was sadly their exit from our organization, too soon. We said goodbye to thousands of people who didn't want to leave. It wasn't time for them to go, but we simply don't have enough work. So, I think humanizing that process is something that I'm really happy to stand by with my team.
Yeah, absolutely. And in many industries, there have been some wonderful individual human stories which you can see online. I also know that a number of your people, both who have exited the business, not by choice, and also those that have stayed, have been doing some incredible stuff in terms of community volunteering. Are there one or two stories that you could highlight for us, or any things that really stayed in your mind from the last few months that you could share?
We've got, I think several thousands of our colleagues who are furloughed, who are working in some way as part of the national effort to combat the crisis with the NHS. And actually, if you are cabin crew for example, you have quite advanced first aid training because you need that for your job, you can't fly without it. So if you've got that advanced first stage training, you're obviously very, very attractive, to the NHS as part of the volunteering effort. Another really humbling thing for me is, and we've got a few of these people now, who have a passion for flying. They’re pilots, and they've trained for years and years to be pilots, at often a huge personal expense, because it's a very expensive thing to do to get a pilot's license – and can put you up to £100,000 in debt really, once you've got your pilot's license. But we're not flying, so there's no work for pilots to do. And I find it very, very humbling that I know of quite a few that are now working as delivery drivers for the likes of Ocado, for example, or Sainsbury's. And they've gone from piloting a passenger jet with a couple of hundred people on it at 35,000 ft., and the next minute they're delivering your groceries in a van. These are hugely skilled, committed, talented individuals. And you know what I've just been amazed at their resilience as well. They've picked themselves up, and they're getting on with something, and I find that quite inspirational.
How do you support a workforce that's literally being grounded? I mean, you mentioned pilots there, but when I was thinking about our conversation, I think of airside staff, customer service people, cabin crew, IT support. What sort of things have you done in your role, and with your team to support all these varied roles?
Well, we've done a number of things. We very quickly created dedicated channels, to provide a wide range of support to do with wellbeing during the pandemic. It's something I take very, very seriously, and part of my leadership responsibility at the airline is around this wellbeing space. It started with a lot of resources around physical wellbeing, how to how to keep exercising if you're working from home in lockdown situations. Also how to keep yourself safe on a commute to and from the airport, because we've still got people who commute to and from an airport every day on the on the tube or the bus or whatever. That relatively quickly morphed into a greater emphasis on mental wellbeing. And we've done huge amounts of things to provide support and guidance to our colleague population on their mental health, because I think we can all agree that it is in a way, the bigger struggle of this entire pandemic - our mental health. Regardless of what your circumstances, we decided to make the Unmind mental health app available to all colleagues free of charge, so they don't have to pay a subscription for that app, and we then extended it. So you can give a subscription to your partner or your flatmate, or your best friend as well. That comes with a considerable cost, but if you've used something like Unmind, and there are other products available, it's fantastically useful as a little tool. We also significantly ramped up the bandwidth of our 24-hour confidential employee assistance program, which is called Help Direct. And unsurprisingly, the volume of calls being made in to Help Direct about mental health are now far greater than they ever were before. But to be able to provide those services is absolutely the right thing to do. And I think that's been appreciated as much as the information we've provided people around what our forecasts for return to flying have been, and the more practical business stuff like that.
I think you're absolutely right. One of my reflections from the period was, that people wanted to be listened to about their own situations. You know this wasn't the time for the communication on pensions updates or the report and accounts, or maybe even annual appraisals. It was really just, you know, let's talk about what everyone's going through and get through this. Just just to build on what you were talking about there I did notice, and others will have noticed that your job title is actually Colleague, Communication and Culture. I wondered if you could just talk about that briefly, because my assumption is that it's a deliberate thing, and it's not necessarily the classic Comms Director or Corporate Affairs Director title. I would just be interested in how you saw your role more broadly as a result?
I would consider myself today, more of an HR professional than a Comms professional. Although my background and the bulk of my 24-year career has been in communications, particularly internal comms. But for the last eight or nine years I've had a broader remit of which, you know, internal comms is a big, big chunk, and it's the chunk I'm very passionate about. But I have a broader remit at British Airways that includes things like Colleague Insight, so understanding our people and employee listening - which is linked to that. There’s stuff around wellbeing, there’s stuff around transformation and change, but the Comms bit is the lion's share of the size of my department for example. Culture is such an important thing in an organization, and I really do subscribe to that adage, that culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the best business plan and the smartest business strategy on the planet, but if there's something wrong with your culture, you're never going to achieve that ambition. So, there is a lot to do at BA in this space. We have had many challenges in trying to adapt to a world where we're not the biggest airline, we're not the cheapest airline, nor are we the most expensive airline. We've existed for 101 years. It's important to underline that we are the oldest commercial continuously operating commercial airline in the world. Only 25-30 years ago, there weren't any low-cost competitors of any significance to compete with us. Nor were there any of the sort of what you'd call super luxury Middle Eastern carriers to compete with us, and the world's changed. Customers want different things and BA has to adapt, and that's something we've struggled with. I think we're getting better and better at it, and certainly our customers believe that we are, if you look at all of our net promoter score data, but with a long way to go and ultimately, we just need to make it an even better place to work. And that's what I'm driving for.
You touched on it briefly there. But how do you think the airline industry is going to differ from this point for travellers? What would it be useful for them to be aware of?
Well, I think the first thing to say is that we don't anticipate passenger levels returning to pre-Covid levels until at least 2023, but quite possibly into 2024. So, it's quite a slow recovery to pre-Covid levels, particularly in the business class premium segment. And it’s the business class premium segment that accounts for the lion's share of British Airways profits. So we have a slow road to recovery to come. It will be a bit quicker for the budget airline carriers, we think. Pre-Covid customers were wanting more and more choice, and that's important. And we will continue to see customers wanting more and more choice and flexibility. But I think most of all customers will want a real assurance that things are safe, and safety in an airline used to mean, I want to be sure that this planes well maintained and an engine isn't going to go on fire, all the sort of things that everybody is terrified of. I think safety in in the new paradigm is around - does everything feel hygienic, you know, are these planes clean? Are they well looked after in terms of, hygiene and so forth. So I think that's going to be a very significant part of our focus in the customer experience for years to come.
No, thank you for that. It's great insight - and just just hearing that is quite a thing. The fact that we won't get back to pre-Covid levels of passenger numbers until 2023 or 2024. That's quite something. At this point I wanted to ask you a little bit about your career, and I think one of the aspirations for this series of interviews is that we get an insight into people as well as the fantastic things they do. When we spoke earlier, you mentioned your first job, and you mentioned that you have a real love of coffee. So I just wondered if you could sort of take us back to the very start of your career? And how it all began.
It does feel like a very long time ago. I studied at the University of Glasgow in the nineties, and I did a master's there. Like a lot of people I graduated without clue what I was going to actually do. And clearly there was an expectation that I would get a job, which I found, an inconvenient expectation on me from my family! But there you go. I had to get a job, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. But I did know that I could write well, and I was I was good at speaking. So somebody said, well, why don’t you think about marketing? Because that would be right up your street. And back in those days the job adverts were in the newspaper, and you'd get the newspaper on a certain day. It was the Glasgow Herald and I can't remember what day it was that the jobs were in the Herald, but anyway I'm looking through it and I saw this marketing assistant or marketing coordinator role for a very well-known family. It was for a coffee and tea company in Scotland called Matthew Algie, who make tea and coffee for loads of restaurants, bars and hotels, and some very, very prestigious places as well. So I thought, well, I'll apply for this - as well as 20 other jobs that I applied for on the same day, and I got an interview and went along to this coffee roasting plant in Glasgow. And strangely, I got the job. So for the next two years, I worked in helping to market wholesale coffee to cafes, hotels and restaurants, and I even ended up being given a project to co-create, design and launch a very cool lifestyle coffee bar in the west end of Glasgow, which is still there. I was only 23 at the time so it was a real privilege. I was basically given this toy box and a blank cheque to some extent and off I went and opened up a coffee shop. It's important to point out this is before Starbucks. This is before Starbucks arrived in the UK, so that whole notion of actually waiting in a queue for three minutes to have a coffee made for you and then paying £2.50 for it, was completely off the scale novel, but it was a great. It was a great two years. I loved it, really loved it, and I'm still mad about coffee now.
I'm so glad I asked you that question in that case. Looking over your career you've worked in some incredibly varied sectors. Just looking down the list I can see construction, engineering, government, gambling, local councils, rail. I'm also a big believer in how those early seminal experiences give you lessons and you take those things with you when you go. I've actually used a lot of things later on, that I learned right at the start of my career. Are there any things that you could take from those early experiences that you've applied to some of those sectors we’ve just mentioned? And what would you say the learning has been from those times.
I've got a huge amount of respect for anybody that stays in one sector, or even in one organisation for a long period of time, because I think that builds a certain form of character and certainly a huge depth of understanding. But I'm not one of those people. As you say, I've hopped around, always in a Comms space, but many sectors and many countries as well that I've been lucky enough to work in. I think the learning for me is that, whether you're working in Comms in gambling or whether you're working in Comms in civil engineering, there are universal truths. And the universal truths are that human beings like a story. And if you can frame something effectively and tell a story, then you're going to engage your audience. I think the other great universal truth for me is that not everyone needs to know, or be told everything all of the time. And I'm sure many of us have sat down in those project meetings or briefings and somebody says, ‘well, we need everybody to know this thing. It's very, very important, and we need everybody to know’, but when you zoom in on it and say, ‘right when you say everybody, do you really mean everybody has to know this thing?’ And you get the response, ‘well, I mean, not everyone’. But you know what most people are like, right? Is it really, really important compared to the other five things that you've said are really, really important this week? Then you agree that, well yeah, it's not the most important one, but you go through that process don't you, you whittle it away until actually at the end of the conversation you're saying, ‘actually, I think you need to get 10 people on the phone and have a quick chat with them’. And the jobs a good ‘un. And that's been the same in every single organization I've ever been in.
No, absolutely. I was laughing and nodding along in the background there, but hopefully it won't be picked up too much in the audio feed. I wanted to ask you about something else as well. I noticed that you'd responded to something online, which was a comedy skit lampooning people in internal columns and marketing roles. And part of part of the joke was, a monologue where they were poking fun at the profession that you and I have spent more than 20 years in. I just wondered if you could react to that and maybe just talk a little bit about how you see the kind of communications profession now, is it actually really misunderstood? Or do you think the comedian was making quite a good point about the fact that a lot of people are quite wide of the mark when they think they're doing great work?
Yeah, I posted that. It was a Twitter thing, and I posted it on LinkedIn and not everybody liked it. Look, I think that I have met some of the most gifted, intelligent, smart and savvy people working in the internal coms field over the years, and it’s a hotbed of talent. Unfortunately, I think even today, there is still a very significant chunk of mediocrity in the profession. And, yes, maybe you could say that about every profession, but it's the one that I know best. And therefore, it's the one that I'm qualified to assess if you like. I've been judging Internal Coms awards for 15 years now and employee engagement awards, and it's a real privilege to do that because you're always learning stuff about something that someone's done somewhere else, that's really smart. You can try a bit of it yourself, and you can take the learning from it. But of the many, many entries that come in to every awards I've ever judged every year, I look at a huge chunk of it and people have not thought about anything other than a very short term smash and grab approach to doing Comms. You know they often haven't even thought about a sustained outcome, there's no real measurement in terms of impact or value, and this isn't just in commercial organizations that we're not talking about. It's public sector and third sector as well. So it does still make me wonder if there are people who will describe themselves as communications professionals or, heaven forbid, communications experts, that don't really understand the wider context of the organization they work in, and they're not really tapped into that organization's purpose. They're just doing a bit of Comms, and that just makes my blood run cold unfortunately.
Just coming back to British Airways for a little bit – what do you think other industries can learn from the travel industry and the airline industry? You mentioned an incredible amount of work that's going on behind the scenes at BA so what things are there that others could learn from? I guess it's that readiness piece a little bit, isn't it?
I think the greatest thing that any organization could learn, from what the airline and travel industry has been going through, is resilience - because it has been relentless for us. Now I'll qualify this, because if I think about the hospitality sector, I think they've had it just as bad, whether you're a one-person cafe down the high road or whether you're a chain of pubs and restaurants, they've been very badly affected as well. But this has really tested our resilience. We have not had any respite at all. For some organizations throughout the pandemic, the biggest single challenge has been their workforces working from home. Now, that's not an easy challenge to have to deal with, but we've had nearly a third of our workforce lose their jobs. We've had half of our workforce furloughed, some for, well it will be more than a year. We have had to sell off assets left, right and centre. I mean, you might have picked up the news story that we literally sold the art from the walls of our first-class lounge, because we had some very valuable art on the walls in that place. This was all to try and raise capital and also conserve cash in the business. I mean, at one point when things were really bad last summer, we were burning £20 million a day operating cash. 20million a day for months. So it’s tested us massively as an organization. And most of all, I think it's tested our leadership community, because we've worked throughout and we've had to make some really painful, painful decisions that have a massive human cost, and it comes with a great sense of responsibility. I think everyone is very tired now. I think the greatest thing that it's brought about within the organization is that we are being kinder to one another. We're being more supportive of one another. People are being far more patient and tolerant with one another because I think everybody in our organization is feeling kind of battle scarred, really. So that kindness that has now come through, I'm not saying it wasn't there before, but it does feel now that we have actually become more human through the pain.
That's great to hear. I have heard other people say similar things in terms of kindness and greater consideration for each other as human beings. Personally, I think we all tend to turn to things that give us comfort during the tough times. I mean, do you have a hobby, or are you into books, films, TV or music? Are there things that you've either discovered or rediscovered during these difficult months to help you through it? What's been your ‘go to’ thing?
Well I am a massive movie fan. So part of my first degree was TV and film history. I'm the worst person to watch a film with because I can't help but pretend that I'm a first-year undergraduate film student all over again, and it's tiresome. I think I have been amazed, just by the amount of content that is available to us now, you know whether you've got Netflix or like a lot of us, you've actually got Netflix and you've got Amazon prime, and you've got Disney Plus and you've got all the rest of them. A big part of the conversation at work every day, when we're warming up in a meeting, is that thing about whether you watched that new thing on Netflix or the BBC or whatever it is - but there's too much, right? There's just too much stuff. But trust me, I do consume a lot of my personal decompression time binging on various box sets and all that kind of stuff. So, the visual arts stuff is huge for me. The downside of that is I find it very difficult to really enjoy that kind of content without opening a bottle of something. And when there's very little exercise being done, that's perhaps not the most sustainable lifestyle choice!
Yeah, I'm having a similar problem with coffee and almond croissants on a daily basis when I go for morning walks. This is a particular issue of mine. One of my Comms from the Shed blog posts on LinkedIn was about the ‘side hustle’. And this is not an expression I made up. This is something that appeared in the ether at some undefined point. But my side hustle is that I like to write articles about music so I've been quite into music journalism in my spare time, which gives me a lot of joy and enjoyment. Is there anything that you would describe as a side hustle that you either do to maintain balance in your life, or that you're planning to get back to at some point?
Yeah, I mean it's not as cool as music journalism, which makes me feel a bit envious of you. What I have done, and I haven't done it during the pandemic unfortunately, because it's not been possible…is that a couple of years ago I joined an amazing charity called Mayhew, which is an animal charity based in London. They do work around the world, and one of the things that Mayhew does is a therapy dog service, where they match up particular dogs and their owners with particular types of individuals, or groups of individuals, who would benefit from contact with one of these dogs. My lovely dog Gizmo who is a very old, very friendly French bulldog, is trained to go with me into hospital wards, particularly for the elderly and also even into intensive care believe it or not, where people aren't necessarily conscious. Gizmo sits on the bed with someone for maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes and just by touching him - and this has been done in intensive care units - literally just laying their hand on the dog, there is a remarkable sort of healing connection, which maybe sounds a little bit overwrought. But anybody that that is a dog person will know, and I'm sure it's the same with cat people - that contact with the animal can really help your mental wellbeing. It's not for everybody, but perhaps if you're if you're on a ward and you've been isolated from your family, and maybe from your own pet, then maybe just a little bit of time with somebody else's dog is a lovely little thing to brighten up an otherwise pretty distressing time. So I can't wait to get back in with Gizmo into Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and spread a bit of the love.
No, absolutely. I'm nodding away in the background here. My family got a pet cat recently with a very traditional old school name, who has brought us immense joy during the lockdown. I must say it's been something that we've been talking about for the last couple of years, but we didn't want to replace our old cat too soon. That's wonderful. I must also ask you, just on the personal side, to get an insight into the human being behind the professional. I was going to ask if there was one unusual fact about yourself that people listening would be unlikely to know? I'm happy to share one with you. Which is that when I worked for Royal Mail many years ago, I once cycled up the Champs-Elysees with a delegation of postal services from across Europe, and we were all in traditional dress and on royal mail bikes, accompanied by a police escort. So that's possibly a fact that not everyone will know about me. I just wondered if there is anything that you could share, that maybe people reading your LinkedIn posts might not necessarily glean from your background?
Well, there's a few. I'll give you a good one. Some of some of the listeners will have seen the film Shallow Grave, which was a film set in Edinburgh in the 1990s. So this is way back in my youth and the film starred Ewan McGregor amongst other people. At the time that the film was being made and being marketed, I was signed up to a voice over agency whilst I was a student. It was a way of getting a bit of extra income, and I’d do little voiceover bits for radio jingles and all that kind of stuff. And they'd be on Radio Clyde and other Scottish radio stations. They did a promotional thing for Shallow Grave when it came out, and I had to do a voice piece for radio that was actually meant to be Ewan McGregor. But it wasn't Ewan McGregor, it was me - because they couldn't get Ewan McGregor to do it. And I had to do my best. Now it helps that Ewan McGregor and I are from the same part of Scotland, and we went to school very close to one another, so it was a bit easier. But yeah, that's my claim to fame, but unfortunately the rest of your McGregor's fame didn't then come to me.
I'm now seeing you as an Obi Wan Kenobi figure sort of by proxy! It's been really good talking to you Drew, so I wanted to close out with a couple of thoughts, and also ask your opinions on the future. What are your hopes and aspirations for the next few months, what would you say would be a good outcome?
I think like almost everybody my biggest hope is that we get through this thing sooner rather than later. It feels like it's been a terribly, terribly long time, and I know that recovery is going to take time, and the economy in the UK and other countries is going to take a very long time to recover. But I just really hope that very soon people can just meet their mates, and have a hug and go for dinner, and pretend like it was the before times. That human contact thing - I'm a fairly tactile person, you know, and I'm very happy to admit it, so not being able to hug people has been really horrible. So that's my biggest hope, that we can get back to hugging our friends and having a laugh with them very soon.
That's a wonderful thought, and I'm going to close out with this final question, which is: if the world had returned to normal right now - whatever normal might ever mean in the future - where would you be going for morning coffee if you could choose just one place?
If I could choose anywhere, then I would get up to Byres Road in the west end of Glasgow and go to that coffee shop I helped create all those many years ago. It's called Tinderbox and it’s still there. I recommend it heartily. You'll get a brilliant coffee at Tinderbox and when you go there you can see the silver Vespa moped in the window, and you can be safe in the knowledge that I rode that silver Vespa and put it in that window. You can sit and have a coffee next to it.
Well, I think that's a wonderful point to end on, and you're also making me want to go to Tinderbox, to see that Vespa and taste some of that wonderful Glaswegian coffee. So you may well have driven others into the arms of that great institution in the West End. Many thanks for talking to us today, I think it was a wonderful mix of the professional and the personal, and I hope everyone will check out our future interviews with yourself and others, which we will share widely. So, thank you very much, Drew. Thanks for your time.
Thank you.