FBO Insight: Double Down with a Strong Internal Safety Culture
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Multi-Part Series on The 7 Immutable Elements of Building Equity in Your FBO Enterprise
When planning a strategy to boost equity in your FBO enterprise, we highly recommend you double-down on building a strong internal safety culture.
With the cost to repair ramp and hangar damage to expensive turbine aircraft soaring, the drain on the bottom line can be crippling. That’s why a reasonable investment in implementing proven safety programs can help in preventing accidents and events and preserve the integrity of your FBO brand to include building long-term profitable customer relationships.
In a way, a strong safety culture is an integral part of delivering a great customer service experience. Aircraft owners, operators and flight crews have a keen sense of the FBO environment and whether or not there is a strong safety culture in place. Afterall, they are entrusting the FBO to take care of one of their most prized assets.
Perhaps the best safety investment an FBO can make is implementing a safety management system (SMS).
The primary goal of an SMS is the day-to-day management of risks in the workplace and, in the FBO environment, there are plenty of risks to manage. To help manage these risks, a strong SMS program will have the following key elements:
Volunteer Safety Reporting. A volunteer safety reporting system is key to the success of an SMS. This system relies on the eyes and ears of all FBO employees who are encouraged to report any safety hazard they encounter, as well as accidents and events, without retribution.
Accountable Executive (AE). This is usually the FBO owner or President whose primary responsibility is to provide the necessary human resources, as well as time and money, to build a strong internal safety culture.
Safety Manager. The Safety Manager’s responsibilities include overseeing the day-to-day safety activities of the FBO and to help keep safety top-of-mind within the organization. Using various tools, such as root cause analysis and baseline risk assessments, the safety manager helps mitigate risk by cataloging and analyzing filed safety reports.
Safety Committee. The safety committee is comprised of representative employees throughout the organization. The main responsibilities of the safety committee include promoting safety through an exchange of ideas, dealing with safety risks and deficiencies, producing recommendations and perform internal safety evaluations.
Feedback to Employees and Inclusion. An SMS works best when all employees are involved in the process. This includes encouragement to participate in the volunteer reporting system as well as feedback on reports filed. We often encourage safety managers to establish a safety bulletin board where all employees can see and read postings on safety committee meeting notes, analysis of reports they’ve filed and other related safety articles pertaining to the FBO industry.
If FBOs desire to take their SMS program to the next level, we highly recommend the IS-BAH program. It not only incorporates a vibrant SMS, it also includes a set of protocols based on industry best practices. This professional approach includes a three-tier registration process to include verification through audits.
FBOs that are part of the IS-BAH program are often recognized as having a strong internal safety culture by customers to include flight departments.
In our next blog post, we will discuss Developing a Consistent Customer Service Experience as a major component of The 7 Immutable Elements of Building Equity in Your FBO Enterprise.
Please leave any comments you have about this blog post below. If you have any questions, please send us an email: John Enticknap, jenticknap@bellsouth.net, Ron Jackson, ronjacksongroup@gmail.com.
ABOUT THE BLOGGERS: John Enticknap is the founder of Aviation Business Strategies Group (ABSG). He has more than 35 years of aviation fueling and FBO services industry experience and is an IS-BAH Accredited auditor. Ron Jackson is co-founder of ABSG and president of The Jackson Group (TJG), a PR agency specializing in FBO marketing and customer service training. Visit the biography page or absggroup.com for more background.
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