Ups and downs, Closure part II

Autumn last year was a good time in Kenya. From September to November there were no real problems at work and flying was nice. Well, actually there were, but we didn’t know it yet…

Time for a catnap.

After passing the simulator checkout in September, it was back to flying. Things had cooled down between the fleet manager and me, he was actually starting to see us expats as a resource instead of a problem. One of the reasons for this was the huge amount of reports I was writing.

Kenya Airways had a fairly good operation going, but there were still lots of things that could be done better or in a different way. Coming from a background where things work and flights leave on schedule, it was easy for me to point out problems.

During my time in Kenya I had learnt that people do not always react good to advice from a Westerner. With that in mind I tried to be quite careful and mostly only point out the problems, possibly with a subtle hint of what could be done about it.

I’ve got to hand it to my fleet manager; he was trying quite hard and was actually getting things done. More importantly, he actually followed up on the issues. The only unfortunate thing is that it partially led to trying to find a scapegoat, a role no one volunteers in taking. I can actually understand the hesitancy, because people do get fired quite easily in Kenya. However, a lot in aviation is based on the non-punitive approach, in order to encourage reporting and improving safety and efficiency. Unfortunately it didn’t really work that way at KQ.

The norm was trying to escape responsibility, or even effort for that matter. This was especially true it wasn’t quite clear whose task it was. It was also true if there were any problems. A general approach to problem solving was don’t. If it isn’t your responsibility, don’t get involved. Even if it is your responsibility try hiding, by not answering phone calls or emails. If you do it long enough the problems might solve themselves. At least that seemed to be the general attitude.

Even Santa came to visit. But he must
have messed up his calendar, as he
came in October...

One good example of this is when I tried finding out about getting paid for working an off day. This is quite the norm in aviation and all the local pilots, including managers, were getting the payment. Now the problem was that it wasn’t specified in our contract, like it should have. So when I started flying (finally), it was time to raise the issue.

No one was interested. Fleet managers and flight management said contractual issues were the responsibility of HR. HR wasn’t interested, as we now were flying and in that sense out of their hands. It was impossible to get a response and eventually I gave up. It is unfortunate as it would have saved us expats from a lot of problems later, but of course I didn’t know it at that time. The main reason for me giving up was however that we actually started receiving these payments, together with a few other extras that weren’t in the contract but had been mentioned in a briefing.

All is well that ends well? Not quite. In December we suddenly found out that there were going to be deductions in our salaries. We eventually managed to find out that it was all about the flights extras that had been paid during the last six months (yes, including the off day payment).

The repo-man also
dropped by. 

A ton of phone calls and emails finally got us a meeting with the HR Director. He was very nice and agreed that we should be paid for work done.  He was going to see to it. Happily we left the office and continued flying. When we got our next salary the deductions were still there! Four weeks later, after several calls and mails again, we got another meeting with him.

He was still quite nice and assured us that things would be attended to. After two weeks and complete silence, we realized that he wasn’t going to do anything. Then, after contacting the Director of flight operations, we were told that HR couldn’t make decisions affecting the budget of the flight department. No, no, now it was back to square one where the chief pilot was going to sit down with someone from HR and discuss the issue. By this time we knew that nothing was going to happen.

All of this took about 2-3 months, during which time our motivation was spiraling downwards. It didn’t improve motivation that in January we finally were told they weren’t going to extend the contract (that ended in May). Nothing wrong with that (it was their contractual right) and it was expected anyway, but I had started asking in September, as usual not getting any answers…