MNGT-370-2 Prof. Xu WestJet Airlines is an Airliner based out of Calgary Canada that was founded in 1994. By April 17th of 2001, WestJet surpassed Canada’s leading airliner in capitalization. But the growth would not stop there, WestJet would proceed to go public in 1999 with its initial offering of two and a half million shares. WestJet would still continue to grow, opening branches in Hamilton and Toronto. The reason for WestJet’s rapid growth is because they offer extremely competitive rates compared to other airliners, also they believe in maintaining a fun and positive atmosphere. They believe having happy employees means having motivated employees and that leads to a more efficient business. Each employee of WestJet is paid quite well compared to people with the same positions at other airliners. The thought process behind this is that they can get the most out of their workers, an example of this is in-between flights, the pilots will leave the cabin and help clean the rest of the plane with the stewards, cutting out the need for extra employees. Employees of WestJet were empowered by the top management of the company, this meant that every employee felt like they were managing their own jobs and it gave a sense that the company was being run from the bottom-up. Over the years WestJet has expanded its company rapidly and in order to continue to grow at their desired rate, they aren’t sure if they can adhere to their ideals anymore. The very things that made them unique and helped them become successful i.e. the fun culture will be hard to continue in an economic downturn. Since WestJet is a rather small company it is easier for the top management to place trust in their employees. Employees at the call center are given the power to decide if they want to waive certain fees and give some leeway to customers, this is one of the advantages that made WestJet so successful. However, when the company grows so rapidly and hires many new employees its hard to put trust in someone who doesn’t know the system as well, and expect MNGT-370-2 Prof. Xu them to make the right choices. So, this will make it harder to monitor company branches that are far from the headquarters because the current management can only be spread so thin, so WestJet will need to rely on new managers to keep their ideals and spread their message to their employees. Also hiring new employees will be hard for WestJet, this is because they will have to train them from scratch. Since hiring a previous employee of another airliner would mean that they are taking in someone with a different sense of how an airliner should be run. When WestJet hired Steve Smith in they early years of operation from a competitor they were soon to realize the problems of hiring someone with a predisposition of how to do their job in which they were hired for. Steve Smiths attitude didn’t align with the ideals of the company and therefore caused a disturbance that rippled through the company. Smith was out of touch with how fast the company was growing and therefore was ordering people to plan for a growth rate that was far under what WestJet was doing, this led to many employees becoming agitated with their work. So just brining in one person to the company who does not share the same values of the company can negatively affect other people in the company and hurt profit. Since WestJet prefers hiring employees with no experience, they will run into problems. Problems that can shift the way the company operates on a large scale. Hiring new employees costs lots of time and money. They will need to use existing staff to train the new employees and this means that productivity could be slowed down. Since current employees of WestJet are already tasked with multiple duties this means that every time you pull one person away from their job to train a new recruit, you are leaving a larger gap in the system then you would at a conventional airliner. Another problem WestJet has is that they are a very one-dimensional airliner. One dimensional in the sense that they really only offer one basic product. In order to offer fares as MNGT-370-2 Prof. Xu low as they do, they need to only offer the very minimum flight experience. This means no inflight dinners, and no such thing as frequent flyer programs. They also don’t offer any upgrades when it comes to business class or first-class seating. While this approach was very successful in the startup phase, it will need to be changed as WestJet grows and gets closer to the mainstream airliners. While only offering law fare flights, WestJet is only attracting one type of customer. Therefore, it is crucial for this company to adapt to the change in its market segment.
