Airport workers get anti-stress training for holiday travel
NEWARK, N.J. — An irate traveler once raised his hand threateningly at Kaisy Belfon when told a flight was overbooked. Another irascible passenger tossed a bit of bag and baggage at her.
Such stressful moments can happen anytime at an airport, but they’re never more likely than when people are trying to get home for the holidays. So Belfon and hundreds of other workers at Newark Liberty Airport, one of the nation’s most congested, are acquirement a crash course in keeping their cool.
“Pressure causes people to do a lot of things,” said Belfon, a 27-year-old customer service agent for US Airways. “Afterward they can’t give faith to they acted that way, but under pressure they just put in order to react, and then later they say they’re sorry.”
Stress may have existence higher than usual at airports this Thanksgiving, with 24 the public passengers expected in the air and numerous airlines cutting back on numbers of flights due to the silly economy. To help employees cope, Newark Liberty is offering a customer service program by roots in the etch of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “Resiliency Edge” was developed through Tom Murphy, a longtime aviation trainer and head of the Human Resiliency Institute in Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education. “Understand where they (the customers) are coming from, so you can put yourself in their place,” Murphy told the dispose. “Understand that they’re basically not bad people.”
About 500 employees at Newark are scheduled to undergo the 90-minute teaching program, that received capital marks when it was introduced at New York’s JFK Airport in May.
Murphy is the author of “Reclaiming the Sky,” a book recounting the stories of aviation workers who returned to work in the weeks and months afterward the Sept. 11 attacks. His program borrows from the book’s themes and cites four traits of effective airline customer service workers: adaptability, optimism, engagement and proactivity.
Sounds easy in theory, but imagine doing it with a line of 20 people seething over missed connections and misplaced luggage.
In a role-play arrangement, one employee played a man who needed to make a union in Chicago to meet his subdivision of one order, whom he hadn’t seen in six weeks, under which circumstances another played a ticket agent whose shift was nearing an end and who had an after-hours appointment to get to.
The converse was played two ways, before anything else by the agent putting her needs before the customer and shunting him off to another agent — causing him to increase even more out of temper — and the second with her calmly offering him a list of options to consider.
