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11 attacks
Public Relations Review 30 (2004) 37–48
American Airlines’ use of mediated employee channels after the 9/11 attacks Joe R. Downing∗ Division of Corporate Communications, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750113, Dallas, TX 75275-0113, USA Received 22 August 2003; received in revised form 1 October 2003; accepted 1 November 2003
Abstract This study investigates American Airlines’ employee response to the 9/11 attacks. Interviews with corporate communicators at the airline and analysis of electronic publications released internally within the airline reveal how mediated communication channels supported the supervisory communication efforts after the 9/11 attacks. An internal employee campaign called Good Words is used to illustrate how emerging technologies can support the emotional needs of employees after a crisis. The article concludes with lessons American Airlines learned from the terrorist attacks and implications for crisis communicators. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Airlines; American Airlines, Inc; Communication in management; Crisis management; Terrorism
1. Introduction The September 11, 2001, attacks have significantly impacted how corporate communicators do their jobs. Wright (2002) recently surveyed corporate communications executives in the United States to gauge the impact of 9/11. Two major themes emerged from executive responses. First, corporate communicators should primarily focus their efforts on meeting employee needs after a crisis. Second, more effective use of communication technologies will help communicators disseminate accurate and timely information to employees after such a crisis. In a recent analysis in the Harvard Business Review on the organizational communication implications of the 9/11 attacks, Argenti (2002) furthers Wright’s argument. He concludes that “what I discovered is that, in a time of extreme crisis, internal communications take precedence. Before ∗
Tel.: +1-214-768-3378; fax: +1-214-768-4780. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.R. Downing). 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2003.11.004
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any other constructive action can take place—whether it is serving customers or reassuring investors—the morale of employees must be rebuilt” (Argenti, 2002, p. 104). This paper explores how American Airlines (AA) used different technologies—including corporate email, its employee intranet, pre-recorded hotline messages, Internet kiosks, the proprietary SABRE airline reservations system, and fax-on-demand technologies—to communicate to its employees between September 11, 2001, and November 12, 2001. (That November day, AA 587 crashed in a Queens, New York, neighborhood.) This study extends existing crisis communication scholarship within internal employee communication (Coombs, 1998; Heath, 1998; Kent, Taylor, & White, 2003; Pincus & Acharya, 1998; Ulmer, 2001; Ulmer & Sellnow, 2002) and the use of emerging communication technologies during a crisis (Argenti, 2002; Callison, 2003; Calloway, 1991; DiNardo, 2002; Hachigian & Hallahan, 2002; Holtz, 2002; Horton, 2001; Murgolo-Poore, Pitt, & Ewing, 2002). In this paper, I first introduce specific challenges corporate communicators in the airline industry face after a plane crash. These include restrictions on what the public (including airline employees) can be told immediately after an accident and the difficulties communicators face in positioning the airline’s message amidst the large number of alternative media outlets. To that end, I show how different communication technologies can be used to augment and support frontline communicators within the airline. Next, American Airlines is used as a case study to chronicle the events of 9/11. After I describe employee demographics at the airline and specific employee communication channels the airline uses, the focus shifts to how American Airlines implemented these technologies to communicate with its employees after the 9/11 attacks. I then introduce Good Words, an internal employee communications campaign within American Airlines that capitalized on the interactive and community-building features of an electronic medium. The paper concludes with lessons American Airlines learned from 9/11 and implications of this study for crisis communicators.
2. Challenges facing airline industry communicators after a crash After a crisis strikes their organization, employees try to manage their own emotional stress while simultaneously seeking timely and reliable information about the fate of their colleagues (Pincus & Acharya, 1998), how the incident will affect their daily work lives (Middleberg, 2000), and whether their company can ultimately survive the crisis (Bierck, 2002). A plane crash poses additional demands on corporate communicators in the airline industry (Fishman, 1999; Pinsdorf, 1999; Ray, 1999). After such an accident, professional communicators face legal restrictions on what information they can release. The airline must first contact the National Transportation Safety Board after an accident (Hill, 1998). Other laws, including the Family Assistance Act, the Aviation Security Improvement Act, and the Aviation Disaster Act each impact how the airline communicates with its various publics. These limitations potentially create two problems for the communicator. Call center personnel working for an airline may field up to 40,000 calls per hour after a crash (Quintanilla, 1996); these employees may not have the timely and accurate information necessary to do their jobs. Second, journalists may try and fill in missing information gaps by seeking unreliable eyewitnesses, “industry experts,” and other pundits to speculate on what happened (Calloway, 1991). As a result, airline employees often receive their news about an accident on network/cable news or through the Internet before the airline has a chance to position its own messages.
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Once the airline is allowed to officially release information internally to employees or externally to the media—in the case of 9/11, the FBI placed a gag order on American and United Airlines for almost 2 weeks after the attacks—communicators often play a catch-up game to release the airline’s side of the story. By this time, the information that corporate communicators publish competes for audience exposure not only with established news organizations and alternative web-based sources, but also with alternative information sources within the airline itself. Different employee unions, for instance, publish their own information on the web. The content of this information may differ considerably from “official” communications issued by the airline’s Corporate Communications, Human Resources, or Information Technology staff. These communicators, from whatever organizational function, must decide the most appropriate source and channel to deliver this information to employees. Research has shown that employees prefer to receive information from their line supervisor; in general, this individual also holds the highest source credibility within an organization (Larkin & Larkin, 1996). Not surprisingly, routine messages from the corporate office are often sent through frontline communicators—those individuals tasked with writing the employee newsletter for their workgroup, running the local intranet site, or otherwise supporting the line supervisor’s communication efforts. The unique characteristics of crisis messages, however, call for a different strategy. In a crisis, critical information must be rapidly sent to all employees. Communicators in the corporate office may elect to deliver such information through these frontline communicators. Time-sensitive information, however, may be delayed if relayed through this channel. Another option is to send the line supervisor the message, and have him or her relay that message directly to employees. This strategy, however, can also be problematic. Individual managers vary in how much information they choose to relay to their subordinates and, in the best case scenario, it is often unrealistic and overly time-consuming for the line supervisor to accomplish such communication tasks. Given these problems, communicators in the corporate office may elect to send their messages directly to employees. This can be difficult, however, because employees’ job descriptions may limit their Internet access. This is especially true in the airline industry. At least three categories of airline employees do not have continual Internet access, though alternative communication channels can deliver these employees information in a crisis. The first group of employees, gate and ticket agents, may not have continuous access to email or the Internet, but they can receive text-based messages on their monitors through a proprietary airline reservations system like SABRE. (The SABRE system is used to access and print out customer itineraries and tickets.) The second group, ramp workers and mechanics, often receive crucial messages from the same reservations system and through their line supervisor. The third group, pilots and flight attendants, are mobile, though they may have Internet access at home or through an Internet kiosk in an airport crew lounge. System Operations Control can also disseminate information to airborne pilots. Across all three employee groups, fax-on-demand technologies can also send messages to multiple fax machines across the company. The remainder of this article investigates the significant role various communication technologies played in American Airlines’ employee communication response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Data from this article was gathered through face-to-face interviews with members of the Corporate Communications and Research department, respectively, at American Airlines. I was also given full access to all paper and electronic-based employee publications released internally within the airline.
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3. Description of events on September 11, 2001 McCartney and Carey’s (2001) research, based on interviews with executives and frontline managers within the command centers of both United Airlines and American Airlines, report the chronological events of 9/11 as follows. At 6.59 a.m. (all times CST), AA 11 departed Boston bound for Los Angeles with 81 passengers and 11 crew members. At 7.27 a.m. Craig Marquis, the manager-on-duty at American Airlines’ System Operations Control in Fort Worth, TX, fielded a hysterical phone call from a flight attendant onboard AA 11. The woman identified herself as Betty Ong and told Marquis that hijackers had taken over the plane, two flight attendants had been stabbed, one passenger’s throat had been slashed, and the hijackers had entered the cockpit. Moments later she said the plane was descending. Fearing a hoax, Marquis pulled up Ong’s personnel records. While the conversation between Ong and Marquis was still taking place, American Airlines’ executives, including then-CEO Don Carty, were summoned to the airline’s Crisis Command Center near its Fort Worth headquarters. Argenti (2002) described the Center as a “vast room featuring a large, horseshoe-shaped table with fully equipped workstations and a conference call line that can accommodate as many as 200 outside callers” with large-screen television sets equipped to receive satellite broadcasts so news coverage about the event could be monitored (p. 107). At 7.35 a.m., top airline management and operations personnel were paged; the text simply read: “Confirmed hijacking Flight 11.” At 7.48 a.m., American Airlines’ executives were told that AA 11’s radar image disappeared suddenly over New York City. A ramp supervisor at JFK airport (located outside New York City) called airline headquarters at 7.51 a.m. The supervisor said that a plane had crashed into the North tower of the World Trade Center. Executives in Fort Worth turned on ABC television and everyone in the room immediately realized it was Flight 11. At 8.03 a.m., United Airlines’ executives, who were also in a crisis mode within their Chicago headquarters, watched as their own aircraft, UA 175, slammed into the South tower of the World Trade Center. At 8.05 a.m., Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials called American Airlines’ executives to report that they had lost contact with AA 77. AA 77 had departed from Washington Dulles bound for Los Angeles at 7.20 a.m. with 58 passengers and 6 crew members. AA executives did not immediately know AA 77’s location, but they suspected this was more than an isolated hijacking incident. At 8.15 a.m. American Airlines grounded all its planes in the US that had not yet departed. Meanwhile, Don Carty was in contact with United Airlines’ CEO Jim Goodwin and US Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta. Both CEOs told Mineta they were grounding all their aircraft. At 8.25 a.m., the FAA ground stopped all departing aircraft at US airports. Shortly thereafter, both airlines called for all airborne aircraft to land at the nearest suitable airport. At 8.41 a.m., AA 77 crashed into the Pentagon. At 8.45 a.m., the FAA ordered all 4546 airborne aircraft—either en route to, or within the US—to land at the nearest suitable airport (Bond, 2001). The fourth plane, UA 93, crashed that morning at 9.03 a.m. in a southwestern Pennsylvania field. As a result of the tragedy that morning, American Airlines lost 17 crew members; 16 crew members from United Airlines also died. Two hundred and thirteen passengers, not including the hijackers, were killed as a result of the four crashes. All US airports, except Washington Reagan, were reopened on September 13, 2001.
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4. American Airlines’ employee response to 9/11 The events of September 11, 2001, have had a devastating effect on American Airlines. After the attacks, AMR Corporation (the parent company of American Airlines that also owns American Eagle and Trans World Airlines) announced a 20% reduction in its flight schedule and laid off the equivalent of 20,000 jobs within the company (“Company Capsule,” 2003). Tough times still lay ahead. On November 12, 2001, just 2 months after the attacks, AA 587 crashed. Then, on December 22, 2001, AA 63 was forced to land in Boston after Richard Reid (also known as the shoe bomber) tried unsuccessfully to attempt to set plastic explosives concealed in the sole of his shoe on fire. American Airlines is not alone in its troubles; each of the major hub-and-spoke air carriers in the United States have been financially impacted by the attacks. Higher fuel costs, anxieties over the war with Iraq, the SARS virus scare, the rise of low-cost carriers like JetBlue, and the worldwide recession have negatively impacted each airline. American Airlines was especially hard hit. The airline has a strong market share in Latin America and Europe, two regions of the world, like the United States, that have been hard hit by the downtum in the economy. In addition, American Airlines, unlike its major competitors, attracts a significant percentage of loyal business travelers (McCartney, 2003). These combined factors contributed to American Airlines’ loss of $1.04 billion in the first quarter of 2003 (Zellner, 2003). Approximately 70% of American Airlines’ workforce is unionized. Even though the airline pays some of the highest labor costs in the industry (at the time of this analysis, 49% of AMR’s revenue went toward wages, salaries and benefits), there is a history of strained labor relations between airline management and its unions. Union tensions ran high under former CEO Robert Crandall’s leadership. In 1997, for example, the American Airlines pilots’ union threatened to strike, and President Clinton ultimately had to intervene and impose a “cooling off” period (Ray, 1999). During his recent tenure at American Airlines, Don Carty worked hard to strengthen these tenuous relationships, though one lapse in judgment ultimately led to his departure. Employees from the three major labor unions had almost finished voting on major wage concessions—labeled by Zellner (2003, p. 32) as the “biggest consensual airline restructuring ever”—when, on April 15, 2003, SEC filings reported that Don Carty planned to give retention bonuses to seven AMR executives and protect the pensions of 48 AMR officials. (Earlier, Delta Airlines had announced similar perks to retain key executives.) This news infuriated employee union representatives. Each had put his or her own credibility (and elected position) on the line by persuading members to vote in favor of $1.62 billion in annual concessions to avert bankruptcy (Zellner, 2003). The crisis ultimately led to Mr. Carty’s resignation on April 24, 2003. Gerard Arpey assumed the role as CEO, advised by former Board member Edward Brennan in the new position of Executive Chairman. The airline has, thus far, remained out of bankruptcy court. 4.1. Employee demographics and Internet usage Earlier I noted that relatively few employees at American Airlines have continual Internet access at work. As illustrated in Fig. 1, of the approximately 122,000 employees who worked at the airline prior to the 9/11 attacks, 11% had access to corporate email and 10% had individual Internet access. An additional 40% of employees shared online access at work. Outside the office, approximately 60% had a personal email account, 20% used the web daily, and less than 5% used online resources as their primary source of news and information.
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Fig. 1. American Airline employee use of communication technologies.
5. Internal employee communication channels at American Airlines Given that 40% of American Airlines employees are mobile and that relatively few employees use online resources as their primary news source (see Fig. 1), a variety of print and mediated channels—including more than 30 print publications, 20 email publications, 70 different web newsletters, and 12 managerial phone hotlines—were used to by airline communicators to reach their four primary internal and external publics. These publics include current employees, retirees of the airline, customers, and the financial community. A number of these publications are controlled by frontline communicators and not directly sponsored by the Corporate Communications, Human Resources, or Information Technology staff. American Airlines used six primary channels to communicate with its employees between September 11 and November 12, 2001: Flagship News, the Don Carty Hotline, Jetwire & Special Jetwire, HeAAds Up! (now called Heads Up), and Jetnet. With the exception of the Don Carty Hotline, each of these channels is still in use. Flagship News is the airline’s primary monthly employee print newsletter. This publication is especially important since relatively few employees have continual Internet access at work. Don Carty communicated through his Don Carty Hotline; employees or journalists could call the Hotline (1-800-AACARTY) and receive his pre-recorded message. A company-wide Newsletter, Jetwire, is sent daily to employees with corporate email accounts and then posted to SABRE. Jetwire includes standard features that report data on the previous days’ on-time arrival and departure information, the number of lost baggage claims the company incurred the previous day, excerpts of articles about the company from international newspapers, and the current value of AMR stock. Other relevant employee information is also included in the daily Jetwire message. The transcribed text of Mr. Carty’s Hotline messages were included in Special Jetwire emails, as were any updates or breaking news events that were not included in that day’s Jetwire. Heads Up! is the electronic publication sent to approximately 5000 managers within American Airlines. Its purpose is to notify managers of information before it is officially released to employees. Often times this publication includes talking points for managers to better handle employee inquiries. The information communicated in Heads Up! always precedes the same content distributed company-wide through Jetwire. Jetnet (http://jetnet.aa.com) provides employees with a full-service communications web portal. One hundred percent of AMR’s employees have at least partial access to Jetnet. Employees manage their payroll services, benefits, and travel privileges solely through this portal. From 1996 to 2002, the airline
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maintained IntrAAnet, a relatively simple intranet site that contained mostly press releases, links to outside news about the company, and some investor relations material. In late April, 2002, Jetnet replaced IntrAAnet. During September 2001, American Airlines maintained two other corporate websites: the amrcorp.com and aa.com sites. amrcorp.com targeted primarily the media and financial relations communities. This site included news releases from the past 12 months, fact sheets covering most divisions of the company, and information relevant to the investor community (“Internet Sites,” 2002). The aa.com site functioned as the airline’s consumer website. Here, customers could purchase tickets, check arrival gate information, inquire about their frequent flier status, and so forth. This site was run by American’s Interactive Marketing group.
6. How American Airlines communicated internally after 9/11 Immediately after the attacks, the two primary objectives of American Airlines’ management were to keep the airline operational while simultaneously being sensitive to employees’ emotional needs at work (personal conversation, Mick Doherty, May 30, 2003). System Operations Control immediately dispatched 350 Customer Assistance Relief Effort (CARE) volunteers to the two crash sites to assist victims’ families. An additional 300 CARE employees were available by phone in Dallas/Fort Worth to help victims’ families and airline employees cope with the aftermath of the disaster (Fearn-Banks, 2002). Starting on September 14, American Airlines’ Employee Assistance Program set up a special “Comfort Room” at American’s Headquarters, and three additional rooms were made available for employees within the DFW airport. The airline’s CARE team played a vital interpersonal role in helping employees (and victims’ family members) emotionally manage the crisis. American Airlines’ corporate communicators also used mediated channels to support the interpersonal communication efforts of CARE teams. Four communication channels were especially relevant during 9/11: the airline’s three websites (aa.com, amrcorp.com, and the employee IntrAAnet), the Don Carty Hotline, email (Jetwire/Special Jetwire and HeAAds Up!), and the SABRE machines. Flagship News, the monthly employee print publication, reinforced messages sent through each of the electronic mediums. Five minutes after Tim Wagner—American Airlines’ Webmaster in charge of the IntrAAnet and updating the amrcorp.com site—learned of the second plane crash (AA 77) the morning of 9/11, he faced two fundamental challenges: providing timely updates to the airline’s various publics while simultaneously avoiding an amrcorp.com server overload due to the huge volume of users. Quarantelli (1988) has argued that immediately after a disaster, one of the greatest intraorganizational communication challenges an organization faces is the extraordinary increase in volume that overtaxes a company’s information infrastructure. Immediately, Wagner replaced the normal content of amrcorp.com’s homepage with a simple message acknowledging what he knew—that two planes had crashed and the company would post additional information as it became available. Wagner also posted phone numbers for victims’ families to call. He minimized site graphics and had the airline’s Information Technology department divert job-related tasks to another server (Price, 2002, para 4). While Wagner was updating the amrcorp.com site, various communication strategies were also used that morning to push information to employees. Shortly after the attacks the first email to employees was sent from Corporate Security this email urged employees to limit their outgoing phone calls. Shortly
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Fig. 2. Special Jetwire for Tuesday, September, 11, 2001. Published by Corporate Communications.
thereafter, a similar message was sent from Corporate Communications directing all employees to limit their use of the Internet. Mick Doherty, American Airlines’ Managing Editor of Employee Publications, sent the first detailed email about the attacks to HeAAds Up! Shortly thereafter, corporate communications sent employees a message through Special Jetwire. The text of this email is included in Fig. 2. The 40% of American Airlines’ employees who did not have continuous access to the Internet could either call the Don Carty Hotline for updated information or wait for Mr. Carty’s message to automatically be forwarded to his or her voicemail. Transcripts of Hotline messages were also sent via fax to field offices and post to the SABRE system. Over the next 24 h following the attacks, the company’s servers became less overwhelmed. Wagner subsequently created a scaled-down version of amrcorp.com’s content and uploaded the new version to the site. Relevant employee communication issues (information about colleagues killed in the attacks, counseling services available to employees, and the text of Don Carty Hotline messages) were added to the IntrAAnet, aa.com, amrcorp.com, and Jetnet sites. (Since Jetnet was in a development phase at the time, it was not a primary source of employee information.) Information for external publics, particularly
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the press and victims’ families, was included on amrcorp.com. Access to job-related tasks accomplished through amrcorp.com’s server were also quickly made available to employees. Overall, Wagner’s philosophy was to: . . . be respectful and low-key, but don’t take away any information reporters can use . . . we were very careful to make sure that they [the reader] understood that this was a United States tragedy, not an airline tragedy . . . [we] focused on communication about the crisis. You don’t want your audience thinking the airline is promoting sales or other events/news at the company. Investors want to know that the company is still running and solving the problem, but the audience should sense from messages on the site, that ‘business is continuing to operate as usual.’ (Electronic communication between Tim Wagner and Alexandria Dicksonleach, November 13, 2002) Wagner also hoped the airline’s publics would go to its corporate website and not call American Airlines’ call centers for information. (AA’s Reservations Office handled nearly 40,000 calls in the first 24 h after the 9/11 attacks.) The amrcorp.com server did not measure web traffic on 9/11, but Wagner estimates that traffic tripled or quadrupled during that first week after the attacks. In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, Mick Doherty and his corporate communication colleagues received hundreds of messages (prayers, poems, and condolence notes) via fax and email from customers, vendors, and industry competitors. On September 24, 2001, Doherty began to intersperse these messages of goodwill into the (mostly grim) operational news he typically had to report to employees. This Good Words campaign was expanded; American Airlines’ employees were asked to contribute their own personal reactions to what happened. Doherty opened this campaign with the following email message: As we head into what our CEO Don Carty has publicly acknowledged will “still be another difficult week at American Airlines,” let’s not forget how often those in our industry have been told what they can’t do . . . and how wrong those naysayers have been . . . As an industry facing what may seem like impossible odds, it’s never a bad idea to look back and realize that the very existence of the aviation industry was based on overcoming impossible odds. And we’ll do it again. (Doherty, 2002, p. 3) Employees began to send in their own stories, and these were added to the messages the airline had already received. Ultimately, this allowed employee reactions to become part of the story. Good Words was picked up and include in other internal AA websites. Doherty noted that the campaign “encouraged more people to send those stories in. So it was not only viral, but self-replicating” (personal conversation, Mick Doherty, May 30, 2003). American Airlines’ Good Words campaign illustrates how internal mediated communication channels, with their community-building and interactivity capabilities (Rheingold, 2000), can support crisis communication efforts. This campaign effectively incorporated Troester’s (1991) recommendation that a company “focus on shared emotions” when communicating to employees after a crisis (p. 533). In addition, involving employees in the crisis response gives employees a sense of control and the belief that management cares about their input (Stern, 1987).
7. Lessons American Airlines learned from the 9/11 attacks Approximately 2 months after the 9/11 attacks—on November 12, 2001—AA 587, bound from JFK to the Dominican Republic, crashed into a Queens, New York, neighborhood. Mechanical failure in
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the Airbus’ rudder is still being investigated as the cause of the crash. Two hundred and fifty-one passengers, nine crew members, and five people on the ground were killed in that accident (Hosenball & Begley, 2001). Immediately after the crash of Flight 587, Wagner left all links active on amrcorp.com, but “grayed out” any color on the website. All front-page information on the site was about the accident. The site remained grayed out for approximately 1 week. Practitioners specializing in online crisis communications (Holtz, 2002; Horton, 2001; Middleberg, 2000) each argue this is an effective design strategy for organization to use to reflect the somber mood after a crisis. American Airlines also learned on September 11th that the different communication functions within the organization (Corporate Communications, Human Resources, and Information Technology) must be closely linked and individually tasked with responsibilities after a crisis. Interactive Marketing, and not Corporate Communications or Human Resources, maintained the aa.com site. This finding supports Horton’s (2001, p. 82) argument that lines of authority in an organization should clearly be defined as who will post what information. Finally, communicators at the airline learned that technologies like employee intranet portals, email newsletters, and fax-on-demand technologies each can significantly impact the communication demands of the airline’s CEO immediately after a crisis. Traditionally, the CEO focuses his or her energies on external publics, especially the media and the investor relations communities. These technologies allow a CEO to quickly communicate targeted messages to employees while maintaining crucial “face time” with external publics.
8. Implications and conclusion The use of communication technologies has not been fully recognized and incorporated into employee crisis communication research. The results from this case study of the American Airlines’ employee communications response between September 11 and November 12, 2001, has at least two implications for crisis communicators. First, mediated channels can effectively support supervisory communication efforts after a crisis. These channels can include email, employee portals/intranets, executive hotlines, fax-on-demand technologies, and proprietary systems like SABRE. Technologies that specifically target managers—like Heads Up! within American Airlines—are especially helpful during a crisis because managers receive important information before their employees. Finally, use of such electronic employee communication vehicles frees up the airline’s CEO to focus his efforts on communicating to external publics (Burson, 1995; Small, 1991). Ulmer and Sellnow (2002) recently argued traditional rhetorical strategies of attributing blame and diffusing organizational responsibility were not appropriate after 9/11; instead messages of hope and renewal for the future were more fitting. This case study of American Airlines’ response to 9/11 furthers this argument and renews interest in targeting employees’ needs after a crisis.
Acknowledgements I want to thank Mick Doherty, Tim Doke, King Douglas, Marty Heires, William Mitchell, Andrea Rader, Tim Wagner, and Gus Whitcomb for their support in this project.
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American Airlines’ use of mediated employee channels after the 9/11 attacks Joe R. Downing∗ Division of Corporate Communications, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750113, Dallas, TX 75275-0113, USA Received 22 August 2003; received in revised form 1 October 2003; accepted 1 November 2003
Abstract This study investigates American Airlines’ employee response to the 9/11 attacks. Interviews with corporate communicators at the airline and analysis of electronic publications released internally within the airline reveal how mediated communication channels supported the supervisory communication efforts after the 9/11 attacks. An internal employee campaign called Good Words is used to illustrate how emerging technologies can support the emotional needs of employees after a crisis. The article concludes with lessons American Airlines learned from the terrorist attacks and implications for crisis communicators. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Airlines; American Airlines, Inc; Communication in management; Crisis management; Terrorism
1. Introduction The September 11, 2001, attacks have significantly impacted how corporate communicators do their jobs. Wright (2002) recently surveyed corporate communications executives in the United States to gauge the impact of 9/11. Two major themes emerged from executive responses. First, corporate communicators should primarily focus their efforts on meeting employee needs after a crisis. Second, more effective use of communication technologies will help communicators disseminate accurate and timely information to employees after such a crisis. In a recent analysis in the Harvard Business Review on the organizational communication implications of the 9/11 attacks, Argenti (2002) furthers Wright’s argument. He concludes that “what I discovered is that, in a time of extreme crisis, internal communications take precedence. Before ∗
Tel.: +1-214-768-3378; fax: +1-214-768-4780. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.R. Downing). 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2003.11.004
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any other constructive action can take place—whether it is serving customers or reassuring investors—the morale of employees must be rebuilt” (Argenti, 2002, p. 104). This paper explores how American Airlines (AA) used different technologies—including corporate email, its employee intranet, pre-recorded hotline messages, Internet kiosks, the proprietary SABRE airline reservations system, and fax-on-demand technologies—to communicate to its employees between September 11, 2001, and November 12, 2001. (That November day, AA 587 crashed in a Queens, New York, neighborhood.) This study extends existing crisis communication scholarship within internal employee communication (Coombs, 1998; Heath, 1998; Kent, Taylor, & White, 2003; Pincus & Acharya, 1998; Ulmer, 2001; Ulmer & Sellnow, 2002) and the use of emerging communication technologies during a crisis (Argenti, 2002; Callison, 2003; Calloway, 1991; DiNardo, 2002; Hachigian & Hallahan, 2002; Holtz, 2002; Horton, 2001; Murgolo-Poore, Pitt, & Ewing, 2002). In this paper, I first introduce specific challenges corporate communicators in the airline industry face after a plane crash. These include restrictions on what the public (including airline employees) can be told immediately after an accident and the difficulties communicators face in positioning the airline’s message amidst the large number of alternative media outlets. To that end, I show how different communication technologies can be used to augment and support frontline communicators within the airline. Next, American Airlines is used as a case study to chronicle the events of 9/11. After I describe employee demographics at the airline and specific employee communication channels the airline uses, the focus shifts to how American Airlines implemented these technologies to communicate with its employees after the 9/11 attacks. I then introduce Good Words, an internal employee communications campaign within American Airlines that capitalized on the interactive and community-building features of an electronic medium. The paper concludes with lessons American Airlines learned from 9/11 and implications of this study for crisis communicators.
2. Challenges facing airline industry communicators after a crash After a crisis strikes their organization, employees try to manage their own emotional stress while simultaneously seeking timely and reliable information about the fate of their colleagues (Pincus & Acharya, 1998), how the incident will affect their daily work lives (Middleberg, 2000), and whether their company can ultimately survive the crisis (Bierck, 2002). A plane crash poses additional demands on corporate communicators in the airline industry (Fishman, 1999; Pinsdorf, 1999; Ray, 1999). After such an accident, professional communicators face legal restrictions on what information they can release. The airline must first contact the National Transportation Safety Board after an accident (Hill, 1998). Other laws, including the Family Assistance Act, the Aviation Security Improvement Act, and the Aviation Disaster Act each impact how the airline communicates with its various publics. These limitations potentially create two problems for the communicator. Call center personnel working for an airline may field up to 40,000 calls per hour after a crash (Quintanilla, 1996); these employees may not have the timely and accurate information necessary to do their jobs. Second, journalists may try and fill in missing information gaps by seeking unreliable eyewitnesses, “industry experts,” and other pundits to speculate on what happened (Calloway, 1991). As a result, airline employees often receive their news about an accident on network/cable news or through the Internet before the airline has a chance to position its own messages.
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Once the airline is allowed to officially release information internally to employees or externally to the media—in the case of 9/11, the FBI placed a gag order on American and United Airlines for almost 2 weeks after the attacks—communicators often play a catch-up game to release the airline’s side of the story. By this time, the information that corporate communicators publish competes for audience exposure not only with established news organizations and alternative web-based sources, but also with alternative information sources within the airline itself. Different employee unions, for instance, publish their own information on the web. The content of this information may differ considerably from “official” communications issued by the airline’s Corporate Communications, Human Resources, or Information Technology staff. These communicators, from whatever organizational function, must decide the most appropriate source and channel to deliver this information to employees. Research has shown that employees prefer to receive information from their line supervisor; in general, this individual also holds the highest source credibility within an organization (Larkin & Larkin, 1996). Not surprisingly, routine messages from the corporate office are often sent through frontline communicators—those individuals tasked with writing the employee newsletter for their workgroup, running the local intranet site, or otherwise supporting the line supervisor’s communication efforts. The unique characteristics of crisis messages, however, call for a different strategy. In a crisis, critical information must be rapidly sent to all employees. Communicators in the corporate office may elect to deliver such information through these frontline communicators. Time-sensitive information, however, may be delayed if relayed through this channel. Another option is to send the line supervisor the message, and have him or her relay that message directly to employees. This strategy, however, can also be problematic. Individual managers vary in how much information they choose to relay to their subordinates and, in the best case scenario, it is often unrealistic and overly time-consuming for the line supervisor to accomplish such communication tasks. Given these problems, communicators in the corporate office may elect to send their messages directly to employees. This can be difficult, however, because employees’ job descriptions may limit their Internet access. This is especially true in the airline industry. At least three categories of airline employees do not have continual Internet access, though alternative communication channels can deliver these employees information in a crisis. The first group of employees, gate and ticket agents, may not have continuous access to email or the Internet, but they can receive text-based messages on their monitors through a proprietary airline reservations system like SABRE. (The SABRE system is used to access and print out customer itineraries and tickets.) The second group, ramp workers and mechanics, often receive crucial messages from the same reservations system and through their line supervisor. The third group, pilots and flight attendants, are mobile, though they may have Internet access at home or through an Internet kiosk in an airport crew lounge. System Operations Control can also disseminate information to airborne pilots. Across all three employee groups, fax-on-demand technologies can also send messages to multiple fax machines across the company. The remainder of this article investigates the significant role various communication technologies played in American Airlines’ employee communication response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Data from this article was gathered through face-to-face interviews with members of the Corporate Communications and Research department, respectively, at American Airlines. I was also given full access to all paper and electronic-based employee publications released internally within the airline.
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3. Description of events on September 11, 2001 McCartney and Carey’s (2001) research, based on interviews with executives and frontline managers within the command centers of both United Airlines and American Airlines, report the chronological events of 9/11 as follows. At 6.59 a.m. (all times CST), AA 11 departed Boston bound for Los Angeles with 81 passengers and 11 crew members. At 7.27 a.m. Craig Marquis, the manager-on-duty at American Airlines’ System Operations Control in Fort Worth, TX, fielded a hysterical phone call from a flight attendant onboard AA 11. The woman identified herself as Betty Ong and told Marquis that hijackers had taken over the plane, two flight attendants had been stabbed, one passenger’s throat had been slashed, and the hijackers had entered the cockpit. Moments later she said the plane was descending. Fearing a hoax, Marquis pulled up Ong’s personnel records. While the conversation between Ong and Marquis was still taking place, American Airlines’ executives, including then-CEO Don Carty, were summoned to the airline’s Crisis Command Center near its Fort Worth headquarters. Argenti (2002) described the Center as a “vast room featuring a large, horseshoe-shaped table with fully equipped workstations and a conference call line that can accommodate as many as 200 outside callers” with large-screen television sets equipped to receive satellite broadcasts so news coverage about the event could be monitored (p. 107). At 7.35 a.m., top airline management and operations personnel were paged; the text simply read: “Confirmed hijacking Flight 11.” At 7.48 a.m., American Airlines’ executives were told that AA 11’s radar image disappeared suddenly over New York City. A ramp supervisor at JFK airport (located outside New York City) called airline headquarters at 7.51 a.m. The supervisor said that a plane had crashed into the North tower of the World Trade Center. Executives in Fort Worth turned on ABC television and everyone in the room immediately realized it was Flight 11. At 8.03 a.m., United Airlines’ executives, who were also in a crisis mode within their Chicago headquarters, watched as their own aircraft, UA 175, slammed into the South tower of the World Trade Center. At 8.05 a.m., Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials called American Airlines’ executives to report that they had lost contact with AA 77. AA 77 had departed from Washington Dulles bound for Los Angeles at 7.20 a.m. with 58 passengers and 6 crew members. AA executives did not immediately know AA 77’s location, but they suspected this was more than an isolated hijacking incident. At 8.15 a.m. American Airlines grounded all its planes in the US that had not yet departed. Meanwhile, Don Carty was in contact with United Airlines’ CEO Jim Goodwin and US Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta. Both CEOs told Mineta they were grounding all their aircraft. At 8.25 a.m., the FAA ground stopped all departing aircraft at US airports. Shortly thereafter, both airlines called for all airborne aircraft to land at the nearest suitable airport. At 8.41 a.m., AA 77 crashed into the Pentagon. At 8.45 a.m., the FAA ordered all 4546 airborne aircraft—either en route to, or within the US—to land at the nearest suitable airport (Bond, 2001). The fourth plane, UA 93, crashed that morning at 9.03 a.m. in a southwestern Pennsylvania field. As a result of the tragedy that morning, American Airlines lost 17 crew members; 16 crew members from United Airlines also died. Two hundred and thirteen passengers, not including the hijackers, were killed as a result of the four crashes. All US airports, except Washington Reagan, were reopened on September 13, 2001.
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4. American Airlines’ employee response to 9/11 The events of September 11, 2001, have had a devastating effect on American Airlines. After the attacks, AMR Corporation (the parent company of American Airlines that also owns American Eagle and Trans World Airlines) announced a 20% reduction in its flight schedule and laid off the equivalent of 20,000 jobs within the company (“Company Capsule,” 2003). Tough times still lay ahead. On November 12, 2001, just 2 months after the attacks, AA 587 crashed. Then, on December 22, 2001, AA 63 was forced to land in Boston after Richard Reid (also known as the shoe bomber) tried unsuccessfully to attempt to set plastic explosives concealed in the sole of his shoe on fire. American Airlines is not alone in its troubles; each of the major hub-and-spoke air carriers in the United States have been financially impacted by the attacks. Higher fuel costs, anxieties over the war with Iraq, the SARS virus scare, the rise of low-cost carriers like JetBlue, and the worldwide recession have negatively impacted each airline. American Airlines was especially hard hit. The airline has a strong market share in Latin America and Europe, two regions of the world, like the United States, that have been hard hit by the downtum in the economy. In addition, American Airlines, unlike its major competitors, attracts a significant percentage of loyal business travelers (McCartney, 2003). These combined factors contributed to American Airlines’ loss of $1.04 billion in the first quarter of 2003 (Zellner, 2003). Approximately 70% of American Airlines’ workforce is unionized. Even though the airline pays some of the highest labor costs in the industry (at the time of this analysis, 49% of AMR’s revenue went toward wages, salaries and benefits), there is a history of strained labor relations between airline management and its unions. Union tensions ran high under former CEO Robert Crandall’s leadership. In 1997, for example, the American Airlines pilots’ union threatened to strike, and President Clinton ultimately had to intervene and impose a “cooling off” period (Ray, 1999). During his recent tenure at American Airlines, Don Carty worked hard to strengthen these tenuous relationships, though one lapse in judgment ultimately led to his departure. Employees from the three major labor unions had almost finished voting on major wage concessions—labeled by Zellner (2003, p. 32) as the “biggest consensual airline restructuring ever”—when, on April 15, 2003, SEC filings reported that Don Carty planned to give retention bonuses to seven AMR executives and protect the pensions of 48 AMR officials. (Earlier, Delta Airlines had announced similar perks to retain key executives.) This news infuriated employee union representatives. Each had put his or her own credibility (and elected position) on the line by persuading members to vote in favor of $1.62 billion in annual concessions to avert bankruptcy (Zellner, 2003). The crisis ultimately led to Mr. Carty’s resignation on April 24, 2003. Gerard Arpey assumed the role as CEO, advised by former Board member Edward Brennan in the new position of Executive Chairman. The airline has, thus far, remained out of bankruptcy court. 4.1. Employee demographics and Internet usage Earlier I noted that relatively few employees at American Airlines have continual Internet access at work. As illustrated in Fig. 1, of the approximately 122,000 employees who worked at the airline prior to the 9/11 attacks, 11% had access to corporate email and 10% had individual Internet access. An additional 40% of employees shared online access at work. Outside the office, approximately 60% had a personal email account, 20% used the web daily, and less than 5% used online resources as their primary source of news and information.
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Fig. 1. American Airline employee use of communication technologies.
5. Internal employee communication channels at American Airlines Given that 40% of American Airlines employees are mobile and that relatively few employees use online resources as their primary news source (see Fig. 1), a variety of print and mediated channels—including more than 30 print publications, 20 email publications, 70 different web newsletters, and 12 managerial phone hotlines—were used to by airline communicators to reach their four primary internal and external publics. These publics include current employees, retirees of the airline, customers, and the financial community. A number of these publications are controlled by frontline communicators and not directly sponsored by the Corporate Communications, Human Resources, or Information Technology staff. American Airlines used six primary channels to communicate with its employees between September 11 and November 12, 2001: Flagship News, the Don Carty Hotline, Jetwire & Special Jetwire, HeAAds Up! (now called Heads Up), and Jetnet. With the exception of the Don Carty Hotline, each of these channels is still in use. Flagship News is the airline’s primary monthly employee print newsletter. This publication is especially important since relatively few employees have continual Internet access at work. Don Carty communicated through his Don Carty Hotline; employees or journalists could call the Hotline (1-800-AACARTY) and receive his pre-recorded message. A company-wide Newsletter, Jetwire, is sent daily to employees with corporate email accounts and then posted to SABRE. Jetwire includes standard features that report data on the previous days’ on-time arrival and departure information, the number of lost baggage claims the company incurred the previous day, excerpts of articles about the company from international newspapers, and the current value of AMR stock. Other relevant employee information is also included in the daily Jetwire message. The transcribed text of Mr. Carty’s Hotline messages were included in Special Jetwire emails, as were any updates or breaking news events that were not included in that day’s Jetwire. Heads Up! is the electronic publication sent to approximately 5000 managers within American Airlines. Its purpose is to notify managers of information before it is officially released to employees. Often times this publication includes talking points for managers to better handle employee inquiries. The information communicated in Heads Up! always precedes the same content distributed company-wide through Jetwire. Jetnet (http://jetnet.aa.com) provides employees with a full-service communications web portal. One hundred percent of AMR’s employees have at least partial access to Jetnet. Employees manage their payroll services, benefits, and travel privileges solely through this portal. From 1996 to 2002, the airline
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maintained IntrAAnet, a relatively simple intranet site that contained mostly press releases, links to outside news about the company, and some investor relations material. In late April, 2002, Jetnet replaced IntrAAnet. During September 2001, American Airlines maintained two other corporate websites: the amrcorp.com and aa.com sites. amrcorp.com targeted primarily the media and financial relations communities. This site included news releases from the past 12 months, fact sheets covering most divisions of the company, and information relevant to the investor community (“Internet Sites,” 2002). The aa.com site functioned as the airline’s consumer website. Here, customers could purchase tickets, check arrival gate information, inquire about their frequent flier status, and so forth. This site was run by American’s Interactive Marketing group.
6. How American Airlines communicated internally after 9/11 Immediately after the attacks, the two primary objectives of American Airlines’ management were to keep the airline operational while simultaneously being sensitive to employees’ emotional needs at work (personal conversation, Mick Doherty, May 30, 2003). System Operations Control immediately dispatched 350 Customer Assistance Relief Effort (CARE) volunteers to the two crash sites to assist victims’ families. An additional 300 CARE employees were available by phone in Dallas/Fort Worth to help victims’ families and airline employees cope with the aftermath of the disaster (Fearn-Banks, 2002). Starting on September 14, American Airlines’ Employee Assistance Program set up a special “Comfort Room” at American’s Headquarters, and three additional rooms were made available for employees within the DFW airport. The airline’s CARE team played a vital interpersonal role in helping employees (and victims’ family members) emotionally manage the crisis. American Airlines’ corporate communicators also used mediated channels to support the interpersonal communication efforts of CARE teams. Four communication channels were especially relevant during 9/11: the airline’s three websites (aa.com, amrcorp.com, and the employee IntrAAnet), the Don Carty Hotline, email (Jetwire/Special Jetwire and HeAAds Up!), and the SABRE machines. Flagship News, the monthly employee print publication, reinforced messages sent through each of the electronic mediums. Five minutes after Tim Wagner—American Airlines’ Webmaster in charge of the IntrAAnet and updating the amrcorp.com site—learned of the second plane crash (AA 77) the morning of 9/11, he faced two fundamental challenges: providing timely updates to the airline’s various publics while simultaneously avoiding an amrcorp.com server overload due to the huge volume of users. Quarantelli (1988) has argued that immediately after a disaster, one of the greatest intraorganizational communication challenges an organization faces is the extraordinary increase in volume that overtaxes a company’s information infrastructure. Immediately, Wagner replaced the normal content of amrcorp.com’s homepage with a simple message acknowledging what he knew—that two planes had crashed and the company would post additional information as it became available. Wagner also posted phone numbers for victims’ families to call. He minimized site graphics and had the airline’s Information Technology department divert job-related tasks to another server (Price, 2002, para 4). While Wagner was updating the amrcorp.com site, various communication strategies were also used that morning to push information to employees. Shortly after the attacks the first email to employees was sent from Corporate Security this email urged employees to limit their outgoing phone calls. Shortly
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Fig. 2. Special Jetwire for Tuesday, September, 11, 2001. Published by Corporate Communications.
thereafter, a similar message was sent from Corporate Communications directing all employees to limit their use of the Internet. Mick Doherty, American Airlines’ Managing Editor of Employee Publications, sent the first detailed email about the attacks to HeAAds Up! Shortly thereafter, corporate communications sent employees a message through Special Jetwire. The text of this email is included in Fig. 2. The 40% of American Airlines’ employees who did not have continuous access to the Internet could either call the Don Carty Hotline for updated information or wait for Mr. Carty’s message to automatically be forwarded to his or her voicemail. Transcripts of Hotline messages were also sent via fax to field offices and post to the SABRE system. Over the next 24 h following the attacks, the company’s servers became less overwhelmed. Wagner subsequently created a scaled-down version of amrcorp.com’s content and uploaded the new version to the site. Relevant employee communication issues (information about colleagues killed in the attacks, counseling services available to employees, and the text of Don Carty Hotline messages) were added to the IntrAAnet, aa.com, amrcorp.com, and Jetnet sites. (Since Jetnet was in a development phase at the time, it was not a primary source of employee information.) Information for external publics, particularly
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the press and victims’ families, was included on amrcorp.com. Access to job-related tasks accomplished through amrcorp.com’s server were also quickly made available to employees. Overall, Wagner’s philosophy was to: . . . be respectful and low-key, but don’t take away any information reporters can use . . . we were very careful to make sure that they [the reader] understood that this was a United States tragedy, not an airline tragedy . . . [we] focused on communication about the crisis. You don’t want your audience thinking the airline is promoting sales or other events/news at the company. Investors want to know that the company is still running and solving the problem, but the audience should sense from messages on the site, that ‘business is continuing to operate as usual.’ (Electronic communication between Tim Wagner and Alexandria Dicksonleach, November 13, 2002) Wagner also hoped the airline’s publics would go to its corporate website and not call American Airlines’ call centers for information. (AA’s Reservations Office handled nearly 40,000 calls in the first 24 h after the 9/11 attacks.) The amrcorp.com server did not measure web traffic on 9/11, but Wagner estimates that traffic tripled or quadrupled during that first week after the attacks. In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, Mick Doherty and his corporate communication colleagues received hundreds of messages (prayers, poems, and condolence notes) via fax and email from customers, vendors, and industry competitors. On September 24, 2001, Doherty began to intersperse these messages of goodwill into the (mostly grim) operational news he typically had to report to employees. This Good Words campaign was expanded; American Airlines’ employees were asked to contribute their own personal reactions to what happened. Doherty opened this campaign with the following email message: As we head into what our CEO Don Carty has publicly acknowledged will “still be another difficult week at American Airlines,” let’s not forget how often those in our industry have been told what they can’t do . . . and how wrong those naysayers have been . . . As an industry facing what may seem like impossible odds, it’s never a bad idea to look back and realize that the very existence of the aviation industry was based on overcoming impossible odds. And we’ll do it again. (Doherty, 2002, p. 3) Employees began to send in their own stories, and these were added to the messages the airline had already received. Ultimately, this allowed employee reactions to become part of the story. Good Words was picked up and include in other internal AA websites. Doherty noted that the campaign “encouraged more people to send those stories in. So it was not only viral, but self-replicating” (personal conversation, Mick Doherty, May 30, 2003). American Airlines’ Good Words campaign illustrates how internal mediated communication channels, with their community-building and interactivity capabilities (Rheingold, 2000), can support crisis communication efforts. This campaign effectively incorporated Troester’s (1991) recommendation that a company “focus on shared emotions” when communicating to employees after a crisis (p. 533). In addition, involving employees in the crisis response gives employees a sense of control and the belief that management cares about their input (Stern, 1987).
7. Lessons American Airlines learned from the 9/11 attacks Approximately 2 months after the 9/11 attacks—on November 12, 2001—AA 587, bound from JFK to the Dominican Republic, crashed into a Queens, New York, neighborhood. Mechanical failure in
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the Airbus’ rudder is still being investigated as the cause of the crash. Two hundred and fifty-one passengers, nine crew members, and five people on the ground were killed in that accident (Hosenball & Begley, 2001). Immediately after the crash of Flight 587, Wagner left all links active on amrcorp.com, but “grayed out” any color on the website. All front-page information on the site was about the accident. The site remained grayed out for approximately 1 week. Practitioners specializing in online crisis communications (Holtz, 2002; Horton, 2001; Middleberg, 2000) each argue this is an effective design strategy for organization to use to reflect the somber mood after a crisis. American Airlines also learned on September 11th that the different communication functions within the organization (Corporate Communications, Human Resources, and Information Technology) must be closely linked and individually tasked with responsibilities after a crisis. Interactive Marketing, and not Corporate Communications or Human Resources, maintained the aa.com site. This finding supports Horton’s (2001, p. 82) argument that lines of authority in an organization should clearly be defined as who will post what information. Finally, communicators at the airline learned that technologies like employee intranet portals, email newsletters, and fax-on-demand technologies each can significantly impact the communication demands of the airline’s CEO immediately after a crisis. Traditionally, the CEO focuses his or her energies on external publics, especially the media and the investor relations communities. These technologies allow a CEO to quickly communicate targeted messages to employees while maintaining crucial “face time” with external publics.
8. Implications and conclusion The use of communication technologies has not been fully recognized and incorporated into employee crisis communication research. The results from this case study of the American Airlines’ employee communications response between September 11 and November 12, 2001, has at least two implications for crisis communicators. First, mediated channels can effectively support supervisory communication efforts after a crisis. These channels can include email, employee portals/intranets, executive hotlines, fax-on-demand technologies, and proprietary systems like SABRE. Technologies that specifically target managers—like Heads Up! within American Airlines—are especially helpful during a crisis because managers receive important information before their employees. Finally, use of such electronic employee communication vehicles frees up the airline’s CEO to focus his efforts on communicating to external publics (Burson, 1995; Small, 1991). Ulmer and Sellnow (2002) recently argued traditional rhetorical strategies of attributing blame and diffusing organizational responsibility were not appropriate after 9/11; instead messages of hope and renewal for the future were more fitting. This case study of American Airlines’ response to 9/11 furthers this argument and renews interest in targeting employees’ needs after a crisis.
Acknowledgements I want to thank Mick Doherty, Tim Doke, King Douglas, Marty Heires, William Mitchell, Andrea Rader, Tim Wagner, and Gus Whitcomb for their support in this project.
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