SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

STUDENT DETAILS

Student name: Phan Phương Thảo Student ID number: 22027661

UNIT AND TUTORIAL DETAILS

Unit name: Strategic Management Marketing Unit number: SMM-T122WSB-1

Tutorial group: SMM-T122WSB-1 Tutorial day and time: Saturday, 12:00 – 3:15 PM

Lecturer or Tutor name: Tăng Thường Phát

ASSIGNMENT DETAILS

Title: Individual Case Study

Length: 1535 words Due date: 13/3/2022 Date submitted: 13/3/2022
Home campus (where you are enrolled): Vietnam

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Student’s
signature: Phan Phương Thảo
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 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY

INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

FINAL ESSAY

Employee Performance
Flight Attendants - Bamboo Airways

STUDENT NAME: PHAN PHƯƠNG THẢO

STUDENT ID: B1112025084

LECTURER: DR. TRƯƠNG NỮ TÔ GIANG

HO CHI MINH CITY, 2021

In order to gain a competitive advantage, companies must be able to manage the behavior or
efficiency of their employees. “Abusive,” “time-consuming,” “burden,” and “manipulative” are
some of the words that come to people’s minds when thinking about performance reviews. Reasons
for such adverse reactions may include performance meetings that were only once a year or tended
to be criticized and backward rather than future improvement. However, without reviews,
employees never know how they perform and what needs to improve, which does not lead to a
good ending for the overall development. Therefore, performance management is such a vital part
that worth discussing and digging in. This essay aims to provide aspects of employees’
performance at Bamboo Airways as performance standards, how to approach and ensure its
effectiveness, and avoid preparation errors.

2017 was an important milestone for Vietnam's aviation industry, which is the arrival of Bamboo
Airways - a member of FLC Group. Then, in 2019, Vietnam Aviation Administration officially
permitted Bamboo to join Vietnam's aviation market. Although it was short-term penetrating in
the market, Bamboo proved its position with safety and quality customer service. With the vision
of striving to become the first five-star airline in Vietnam, Bamboo's mission is to connect tourist
regions all over the country, raising Vietnam's image on the global map.

Becoming a flight attendant is a fantastic dream for any sky lover. However, as with others, this
job holder requires abilities such as the age of 20- 30, height of at least 170cm for men and 160cm
for women with long durations of standing and moving across the cabin, and good health. The
responsibilities of a flight attendant are evaluated as relatively simple. They need to arrange seats,
check baggage, provide directions for guests before and during the flight, and ensure customers'
safety.

Performance standards are defined as the expected showing of employees for satisfactory job
performance, so those standards should be established before work is performed (Robert et al.,
2010). Since flight attendant jobs belong to customer service, its performance standards system
should also include how well employees serve the company’s customers. To achieve that customer
satisfaction, the following criteria should be met:

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Table: Performance standards for flight attendants

Category Elements Successful

Person speaks and Good voice and clear pronunciation.

communicates to The speech is delivered in Vietnamese and
Communication passengers English in a clearly fluent manner.
skills
Person listens to Well concentrate on hearing and is responsive
passengers to inquiries, extra requirements.

Self-check of Wear prescribed uniform, clean and properly

appearance and papers dressed.
needed Personal papers and documents are valid and
suitable for the flight.

Appearance
Posture Standing posture is appropriate with
requirements
regulations.

Attitude Behave gracefully and elegantly in public.

Always smile to make a good impression on

passengers.

Safety equipment Relevant facilities are fully checked as

check regulated.

Security check No irrelevant people or foreign objects on

Safety procedures
board.

Passengers check Customers are seated in the correct position

and their luggage is neatly arranged.

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 There are no passengers violating the
regulations (opening the dining table, not
wearing seat belts, leaving things on the
passenger way).

Stabilize passengers All customers are seated steadily according to

the number of seats.

Passenger service Serve food and drinks Guests are served properly and fully.

Extra requirements Serve passengers immediately, even if their

from customers requests are repetitive.

Emergency situations Calm passengers.

Professionally deal with situations such as

Emergency
fires, terrorism.
procedures and first
aid
First aid Have knowledge about medical conditions.

Be able to cope with fundamental emergencies.

Flight attendants are responsible for bringing safety and comfort to passengers. They spend more
time with customers than any aviation staff and strive to offer the most satisfying flight experience
(CareerExplorer, 2021). According to the above performance standards, the implementation of
employees can be evaluated through observation and comparison; it requires them to obey
accurately without mistakes and continuously improve customer satisfaction. These aspects match
the quality approach, a handy tool to control the process flow tightly. Based on the five criteria for
effective performance measures, which will be mentioned later, the quality approach is considered
as one of the high-effective ones (Raymond et al., 2019). It includes all criteria as strategic
congruence, validity, reliability, acceptability, and specificity with a high rate each.

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To position themselves over the competitors, the airways should try to control and guarantee
quality brought to passengers. The quality approach of measuring performance focuses on
improving customer satisfaction by preventing errors and achieving continuous improvisation
(Giri and Chetty, 2017). By reducing flaws, a job holder as a flight attendant does not require them
to be creative or create new things; therefore, they should strictly follow the performance standards
as a backbone. By doing so, they can assure their works are on track and guarantee the company’s
overall goals. The continuous activities cycle often includes planning, doing, checking, and acting.
Suppose there were any issues with any part of the cycle, the doing part, for example, in which
managers cannot provide sufficient feedback due to overload work. In that case, they can resolve
the performance problems and rebuild that part, which is a continuous improvement.

Compared to other approach methods, the quality approach is outstanding with many advantages.
It emphasizes evaluating both human and system aspects in the measurement system. Unlike
others, this method gives a broader look into all sides of the problem, letting managers better
analyze in situations where flight attendants complete perfectly all requirements, pointing out the
problem belongs to ineffective serving systems. In addition, both flight attendants and their chief
should mutually help solve the problem. While chief flight attendants in a complex work
supervising others, cabin crew can contribute to customer satisfaction, as their work relates more
to passengers.

Once the company has determined what they expect from employees and how to measure, they
should figure out ways to ensure its effectiveness. According to Raymond et al., there are five
criteria underlying job performance measures: strategic congruence, validity, reliability,
acceptability, and specificity. To achieve the long-run benefit, managers should maximize these
five to contribute to organizational goals and motivate employees.

The first criterion is strategic congruence. It aligns between a performance management system
and its strategy, goals, and culture (Raymond et al., 2019). Managers observe and guarantee that
the performance system strictly follows the overall vision and goals. With the flight attendant job,
in this case, emphasizing customer service, then the measurement should relate to how well and
as required they serve passengers. Bamboo airways once said they would bring the experience of
"more than a flight." Indeed, each skycap provides a hospitable and dedicated service with a 5-star
quality orientation; and every passenger's feeling will be heard and respected. A company's success

4
depends on the frequent willingness to account for strategic congruence. Because weekly or
monthly small checks would let managers know if the employees' performances are on track.
Those small attentions would stress-reduce the overall progress and more significant differences.

The second attribution that managers should keep an eye on is validity, which contains only
relevant performance aspects, not deficient or contaminated. All aspects of performance should be
fully listed for ease of assessment; otherwise, it will be considered deficient. In a performance
evaluation of flight attendants, if directors assess only the serving ability and attitudes towards
customers, they fail to measure safety aspects and lead to ineffective results. Besides, contaminated
measure evaluates irrelevant aspects of performance or not job-related aspects, which is another
aspect that managers should avoid. Managers seek to minimize deficiency and contamination, but
sometimes they cannot be eliminated thoroughly.

Moreover, the evaluation assessments should be credible among evaluators, which is the third
criterion- reliability. An article by Murphy proved that job performance ratings are affected by
many errors, and that reliability is relatively low. Therefore, the manager's job is to ensure equality
and accuracy in the performance measurement system. An evaluator tends to bias or shows mercy
to their favorite employees; hence, providing a supervisor to double-check the truth of evaluators
periodically is considered.

As for how valid and reliable a performance measure is, it may be refused to complete if they
consume much of an evaluator's time. Therefore, acceptability should be ensured by bringing
fairness to both employees and managers themselves. As with chief flight attendants, it seems
overwhelming because they are in charge of doing the cabin crew job and supervising one. To
meet procedural fairness, they minimize rating errors and assure all cabin attendants access
opportunities to contribute to the development system. However, performance improvement is
most effective with timely and complete feedback. Managers or evaluators should provide those
in respect and courtesy to employees.

Last but not least criterion is specificity. With specificity, employers need to tell employees what
standards the company expects from them and how they can actualize those expectations. The
application of this criterion should include both the strategic and developmental process of
performance management. As for strategic goals, managers should include a performance measure
with specified action of what their employees must do to achieve stated goals. In the case of flight

5
attendants, it would be much easier as performance standards are provided from the training period.
Additionally, if there is a problem in employees’ performance, it should be pointed out timely to
correct and improve promptly.

Performance appraisal is absolutely a vital part to the development of flight attendants. But also,
giving them an honest frank assessment based on that appraisal is a stressful experience for most
managers. The preparing process observes more complicated problems that evaluators need to be
aware of. There are two steps in the preparation process, with which each one has its own
problems.

The first error mentioned here is unaligned in behaviors and the organization’s goals. This occurs
when identifying what the company is trying to achieve. Then, the problem here is that the
company and department are not on the same goals. The bamboo slogan, for example, is that every
flight attendant is an ambassador and the face of the brand. It requires the skycap to be consistently
professional with enthusiasm and a smile on their face. However, the cabin crew does not follow
that slogan, but they put the passenger’s safety above all. They assume that happy faces are
unnecessary and, therefore, treat customers uninterestedly for their extra demands. It does not
benefit customers, employees, and the organization itself. The company should lead to an
agreement from the beginning and cope with different suggestions from employees.

Another error can come from behaviors or activities listed in performance standards. It means that
when preparing the appraisal, the identified activities and behaviors are not measurable or do not
effectively help employees achieve the performance results. The chief may make mistakes in
establishing unrealistically or irrelevant activities; hence, it cannot be evaluated and does not bring
any improvement for the employees or organization. For instance, flight attendants must resolve
at least five unwanted situations per week. It is impossible to have bizarre circumstances at high
frequency, so this requirement is unrealistic and may lead to disagreements between attendants.
Therefore, management staff should ensure that the behaviors and activities listed would help
boost employees' performance. Also, the performance standards are provided clearly with
measurable criteria and should not vary between managers.

In conclusion, a flight attendant is profession-oriented towards customer experience. Therefore,

their service attitude and skill standards should be closely linked to the company's goals. In
addition, managers should build the performance standards logically constructed with apparent

6
strategic congruence, validity, reliability, acceptability, and specificity. Ensure these standards are
in the measurement method to bring success and growth to the business. However, the errors made
in this process should not be ignored. They should be discovered and improved not to affect the
company's overall performance.

7
 References
CareerExplorer. (n.d.). What does a flight attendant do?. Retrieved December 7, 2021, from:
https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/flight-attendant/

Giri, I. and Chetty, P. (2017). Approaches for measuring performance of employees. Retrieved
December 7, 2021, from: https://www.projectguru.in/approaches-measuring-performance-
employees/

Kevin Murphy. (2008). Explaining the Weak Relationship Between Job Performance and
Ratings of Job Performance. Retrieved December 7, 202,1 from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229642042_Explaining_the_Weak_Relationship_Betw
een_Job_Performance_and_Ratings_of_Job_Performance

Nguyên D. C. T. et al. (n.d.).Tiêu chuẩn kỹ năng nghề. Retrieved December 7, 2021, from:
https://123docz.net/document/1462184-tiep-vien-hang-khong-tieu-chuan-ky-nang-nghe.htm

Robert, L. M., & John, H. J. (2010). Human Resource Management (13th edition). South-
Western, Cengage Learning.

Raymond A. N., John R. H., Barry G., & Patrick M. W. (2019). Human Resource Management
GAINING A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE (11th edition). McGraw-Hill Education.

Vlink. (n.d.). Bamboo Airways – nâng cao giá trị hàng không Việt. Retrieved December 7, 2021,
from: https://vlink.vn/bamboo-airways-nang-cao-gia-tri-hang-khong-viet/