International Stress Awareness Week in Aviation: The Unique Challenges of Rehumanising the Airborne Workplace
At the start of International Stress Awareness Week, I wanted to join the conversation around this year’s theme: “Shaping the Future of Stress and Wellbeing: Rehumanising the Workplace.”
At the risk of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, the airborne workplace poses some unique challenges. We continuously get taught about that - it's one of the main themes in non-technical training in aviation. We learn about the unusual physiological stressors of our workplace (noise, pressurisation, disorientation etc.) and the pilot competencies built into modern aviation training provide generally robust stress management skills - workload management, situational awareness, communication, knowledge and procedures perhaps most obviously.
But stress can also become familiar enough that we stop noticing it. The routine pressures and irritations of a working day can easily become simply part of going to work.
Let's think about the human in a pilot or cabin crew uniform who turns up for work. They move from a crew centre or arrival point, through the airport and airport security, along a jetty or bus and steps to the aircraft. They may get there as a crew or come together onboard. The workplace where we spend most of our day is not our first or only working environment.
What has that human being boarded with? Home stress? Unpleasant security encounters, noise and crowds? No decent coffee available on the way? Passengers who stop the uniform to ask a question they can't answer? The same working environment and the same demands won't necessarily be experienced in the same way by everybody, or even by the same person on different days.
What does the aircraft offer in terms of a workplace?
Physically: defined operating positions, highly technical equipment, acceptable defects to manage in the cabin and flight deck and restrictions on the type and timing of food and drink among others. In terms of process: standard procedures, the pressure to depart on time, the need to work with staff from many other departments and to meet safety-critical requirements for preparation and procedures.
Preparing an aircraft for departure leaves little time for rehumanising the workplace. But could we sometimes find some opportunities? If we have a minute to check in with each other, it often makes a bigger difference than you might think. If there's the opportunity to support someone during a spike in their workload, that's rehumanising the environment in a stress-reducing way. Perhaps the most common opportunity is to look at what our colleagues are doing and to consider how our behaviour impacts them. That's rather vague isn't it?
Here are some examples:
One typical workload split is that one pilot goes outside to do the walk round while the other prepares the flight deck and flight management computer. When your colleague returns from the walk round, being met instantly with something like "are you ready for critical data entry?" can feel stressful. "I'll do the fuel log while you check the box and prepare for critical data" isn't always possible, but it is rehumanising the environment and reducing stress when it happens.
Pilots are expected and trained to cope with interruptions, but interruptions add stress and challenge rehumanising the environment. If you can pause and give them time to break at a sensible point in a checklist or procedure, that's really going to help.
Inside the aircraft, it can often feel as if stress naturally reduces when the door closes and departure preparation is complete. There are (usually!) fewer unexpected challenges to deal with and the process has a detailed definition understood and practised by crew and pilots alike. Once airborne, the environment changes again, and the physiological stressors become more significant. For pilots, the workload generally reduces as they engage automatic flight guidance systems and the radio load starts to decrease. Ironically, at the same time, crew workload often increases with the need to start the cabin service and answer passenger requests and queries. Just when the pilots have time to ask for that coffee, the crew are trying to do the first drinks service in the cabin.
Perhaps rehumanising the airborne workplace becomes an exercise in teamwork and compromise. Our own reduction in workload can make it surprisingly easy to miss somebody else's increase in workload. We can't always wait to ask for the coffee, the cabin crew and ground staff can't always avoid interrupting the flight deck, and the other pilot can't always absorb our workload. But we can recognise those competing demands and make small adjustments when there is capacity to do so.
In the flight deck, especially on longer sectors, there is the opportunity for a fair amount of humanity to enter the workplace in the cruise - with appropriate distraction management - there's often time to chat, take a physiological break and work at a sustainable pace. The cabin can offer similar opportunities. Towards the end of many sectors, there's also the reverse of the irony in the initial stages of flight: as the pilots get busy preparing for the arrival and flying the approach, it's common for the cabin service to be winding down and for the crew to have time to chat and offer refreshment.
While it's not the only way we could adopt this year's theme, using the non-technical skills we already have offers what we might call the "low-hanging fruit". Stress management in the workplace has to be a joint responsibility shared between regulator, employer and employee. Sometimes reducing stress means changing the demands or the environment rather than simply expecting the individual to manage their response to it. The non-technical skills we already have, however, provide a rich source of ways to rehumanise our airborne workplace by expanding their focus beyond standard procedures and failure management to recognising the shared experience of our working day and the impact of our behaviour.
On Stress Awareness Day on Wednesday, I'll come back to this from a slightly different perspective, looking at what psychological skills we can use at work to support this change further.