"Championing Diversity and Balance" – Annette Mann | Banking on Success

Yeah, to your first question. I strongly believe diversity is so much more than male versus female. When I look at diversity in Austrian, we're not just talking male and female, but also your background in terms of nationality, age mix, character mix, educational background. All these things because I think this is true diversity, not just the male-female thing. I think it's really too much narrowed down. All of these kinds of diversity are important. To the females: I strongly believe it's not about female versus male. It's about what you mentioned — women becoming modest? Because I do believe as long as you're only a female without kids, your chances have never been better than today. Most big companies have raised programs, quotas, nearly all companies are actively looking for female talents who want to have a career. So I don't think there's any good excuse not to make a career if you really want it. There are all the opportunities. When you become a mother, it starts to be difficult, but let's be honest, very much because of our countries. We live the idea of family and how we care for families in a very different style. Even France is very different, and the Scandinavian countries are very different, or the US. There is just a different attitude to how they approach being a family, who cares for the kids, and how you share responsibilities. I think you can do a lot as a company. For example, we push shared leadership so that it's not just females but also male colleagues who want more time for their families can do that in part-time leadership positions. It's easy.

My focus clearly is to use the very good DNA of Austrians, a strong core of hospitality, and push that to the next level. Having a very good comparison to Lufthansa and Swiss in detail but also to some other brands, I truly believe this is something very special, not easy to copy — this kind of warm-heartedness and being close to customers. It's probably a bit easier if a bit smaller than being Lufthansa. This is something I really want to further leverage. Yes, today we are good, but are we at a level where we could be and should be? I think there's a lot of potential. That's really the core of what we do. I believe this is not something where you tell employees to be nicer to the customer; it has to be very deeply rooted in your culture. Just two days back we reviewed in our board meeting our recruiting strategy and recruiting efforts of last year. Two years back we started to analyze and said, if we want to be a true hospitality company, it has to start there. How do you approach candidates? What's your experience during a hiring process? What's your experience during onboarding? We came out of a culture where onboarding was done by expert group per expert group, people didn't meet, fostering silos. I believe that is totally wrong. We completely redesigned the experience of recruiting and onboarding, getting people together early. We can see that in our KPIs. Our ratings of how was your recruiting experience jumped from a 3.7 to a 4.8 on a scale of 0 to 5. I think it starts with how you get into a company, the type of people you hire, the attitude towards hospitality. When I hire someone, I ask myself how I would feel if I was invited by that person for dinner at home, and would I think this person would be a good host. This is not just for cabin crew; everyone who wants to be famous for hospitality should have that mindset. We are working a lot on hospitality, how to further push that for cabin crews. They enjoy that; they want to be good hosts. But it has to be very broad in the company. That's how we try to focus on culture, work, and customer orientation.

I would say be curious, because I think you can only have a good management career if you remain curious and want to understand things, to understand how everything fits together and where in a system you have to make changes to make the whole system better. So it's this curiosity to understand complex systems, which was always something I really liked. Basically, I think curiosity and always being willing to rethink is really helpful, probably especially for females. A few days back I was asked what was the best advice I ever got. Probably it was, 'Don't let anyone tell you how many disadvantages you have in life because you're a woman. Just do your thing.' So I tried to live that. I never thought too much about disadvantages because I'm a woman. If you don't think a lot about it, you don't feel it a lot. I'll remember particularly the second one. I'm afraid it might be a cliché, but I'm afraid it's true that sometimes we overthink. Just do. Thanks for that.

Well, first of all, it's absolutely helpful if you love your job. And I do love my job. I'm not a big fan of the concept of work-life balance; it's rather a blending. As long as you're passionate about your job, it doesn't feel every hour like hard work. That is absolutely helpful. Still, recharging is super important. For me, it's being out in nature. That's also why we wanted to live a bit on the outskirts of Vienna in a greener area. We have a garden there. Being in nature, and whenever I have more free time, I'm out on the waters and go sailing. Sailing, yes.