Aviation India: Careers

Cathay Pacific has tried to turn its global training headquarters near Hong Kong International Airport into a temple of team spirit. Employees can wander into classes for yoga and belly-dancing and get a drink at Dhakota's, the company bar. "It's like a big playground," says Steve Lawrence, one of Cathay's training and development managers. The rooftop patio hosts just about every hokey team-building exercise ever invented. Trainees regularly participate in 100-person lap sits, in which each person sits on the next one's knees, forming a circle while trying mightily to stay balanced.
These exercises can do only so much. "Team-building events just create a shared experience for people," says Lawrence, "nothing more, nothing less." So managers help employees make a clear connection between the exercises and their daily responsibilities. At a recent session in which the trainees played the game red/black (teams score higher by coordinating their strategies), a supervisor from Indonesia linked the exercise to dealing with lost luggage without passing blame.
The cabin crew, ground staff, gate agents and customer-service reps for any given flight are always different, so "every time you a have a flight that takes off, you have a new group thrown together for a project," says Jeremy Perks, a director in Beijing for IWNC, a corporate-team-building firm that has worked with Cathay. When those teams break down, Cathay is vulnerable to the same problems facing every other airline. For example, in June a mechanical problem delayed a Cathay flight in San Francisco, forcing 400 passengers to sit on the runway for seven hours and hitting the airline with a rare round of negative publicity.
Cathay's team-building isn't just for the rank and file. At a recent event in Bangkok, top managers, including former CEO Philip Chen, were sent into local Thai grocery stores with 500 baht and the task of planning and cooking new economy- and business-class meals.
The next team challenge? Cathay acquired the Chinese domestic airline Dragonair last year, but integrating its new partner could be tricky. "Chinese carriers do not have a good reputation for customer service," says Richard Aboulafia, an airline analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. Tyler says he wants "to make sure Dragonair staff feel they belong--to make sure nobody was having lunch alone." Perhaps it's time to bring back Morning Boogie.
18/10/07 Krista Mahr/TIME