Policy & Strategy

In today's business environment, it has become important to implement strategies to not only ensure the highest possible profit margins for the company, but also to ensure employee satisfaction. Indeed, that latter works concomitantly with the former to promote the company's success. When employees are satisfied within their working environment, there is a lower worker turnover. This reduces the costs in terms of human resources and revenue in training new employees. Employee empowerment also plays and important role in the success of a company; it is an element that goes hand-in-hand with employee satisfaction. Empowerment helps to make employees feel in control of the work environment and of the terms according to which they will perform well.

In the JetBlue company, employees are empowered to optimize their loyalty to the company by honoring its core values: "safety, caring fun, integrity, and passion" (p. 2). To reinforce this culture, the company also has an in-house leadership program that focuses on employee empowerment and satisfaction, with principles such as "Treat Your People Right" and "Inspire Greatness in Others" (p. 7). To bring this program into action, JetBlue has implemented an interesting employee structure. JetBlue has a home-based reservation system, where agents are allowed to work from their home via a remote connection with the central base. These employees are also committed to the company because of the particularly pleasant circumstances of their work. This type of empowerment allows for employee loyalty to the company, as well as keeping labor costs lower. Labor costs are also kept lower by lower than average salaries for the industry. Nonetheless, because of the corporate culture, many more applications are received by JetBlue than other airlines (p. 10). The company makes up for this by high job security, overtime pay, and a high probability for promotion. In this way, the company gains loyalty from both employees and customers.