Scott Ott writes:
>I am giving a little talk to a group of bus drivers in August about
>improving the atmosphere on the bus.
I realize, Scott, you are talking about yellow school buses, but I wrote a
column not long ago about a stunning performance turnaround at the Orlando
municipal transit authority that may have some bearing on your situation.
New management found the drivers surley, resentful and defeated. Union
activity was strong. Efficiency was poor. Passengers were actually fearful
of the drivers and considered the service lousy.
What did new management do? It asked the drivers why they were unhappy.
And the drivers explained that they were being held to ridiculous and
impossible routes and schedules. Fine, management said. Help us come up
with new schedules. Who better knows traffic conditions than the people
who drive the line every day? The result was more efficient schedules and
happier drivers.
The new management celebrated by painting the buses all manner of wild and
crazy colors. They put images of the local basketball demigod Shaquille
O'Neal on a bus and other images from the Orlando Zoo on another. This is
remniscient of the Braniff airplanes of the 1970s, painted by Alexander
Calder, or the Southwest Airlines planes painted like Shamu the Killer
Whale. The bus company even painted the downtown bus shelter pink. (I know
that yellow is the brightest color, but couldn't the interior of a school
bus display lovely images or murales?)
Management also put the drivers in Bermuda shorts and surfer shirts
instead of Ralph Cramden-style uniforms (also remniscient of Southwest
Air).
Finally, the company ran a series of catchy image ads in the local market
extolling its fun and efficient new service. The ads were intended not
only to build ridership but to raise the community's expectations so that
_the driver themselves_ could see that more was expected of them. This was
a calculated positive feedback loop and it worked.
Not perfectly analagous to a yellow school bus, perhaps, but FWIW...
Cheers,
Tom Petzinger
Thomas Petzinger Jr.
new e-mail address: tompetz@msn.com
"The Front Lines"--Every Friday in The Wall Street Journal
"The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are, the
better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members." --Vladimir
Nabokov
--"thomas petzinger" <tompetz@msn.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>