Leadership development | Aviation & travel | AWARD-WINNING
Rebuilding culture at the world’s busiest international airport
Heathrow’s Passenger Experience Managers had held the airport together through two of the hardest years in aviation history. Bearing the metaphorical battle wounds of COVID, the PEMs teams were disillusioned, disengaged, and exhausted. With peak travel season looming, Heathrow needed to get its operation ready for Summer 2023 and get the people leading it believing in what they were doing again.
What Heathrow was really up against
Heathrow is the world’s busiest international airport – 67 million passengers a year, 90 airlines, 180 destinations. It’s a machine of extraordinary complexity, and the people running it at ground level are its Passenger Experience Managers (PEM).
PEMs are responsible for the culture of their terminals, the performance of their teams, coordinating life-saving procedures across their terminals, and the moment-by-moment quality of the passenger journey.
The pandemic dismantled a great deal of what had been built. Roles changed. Expectations shifted. Collaboration gave way to crisis management. By the time the airport began rebuilding toward full capacity again in 2023, the PEM population had been through upheaval that left morale fractured, consistency patchy, and the team culture that underpins a great passenger experience significantly diminished.
Director of Services Operations Tonia Fielding could see both the problem and the opportunity. The PEMs were the key to restoring Heathrow’s reputation for service excellence, but before they could inspire their teams, they needed to feel recognised, reconnected, and re-equipped. They needed a reset.
The window to make it happen, before the summer 2023 surge, was narrow. The stakes were high.
The Impact
average NPS across the nine events
NPS – two of the events achieved a perfect score
increase in employee engagement
The decision that changed everything
Heathrow had already seen what Solvd Together was capable of. Lucy Davies, Head of Learning and Development, had partnered with Solvd on the Lead the Way leadership programme – a large-scale, immersive leadership development programme that had demonstrably shifted engagement and trust across the organisation.
When the brief for the PEM Reset landed, the instinct was to go back to the same partnership. Not because it was the safe choice, but because the brief demanded the kind of discovery-led, genuinely immersive design that Solvd had already proven it could deliver under pressure.
The challenge was to create an experience that made 250 people feel seen, reconnected to their purpose, and genuinely excited about what was coming next.
Digging deeper to design smarter
Before a single session was designed, Solvd went into the business. Research identified five themes running across the PEM population that were shaping culture in each terminal and influencing how the passenger experience was being delivered every day.
Those themes weren’t extracted from a survey. They came from direct engagement with the people who lived them: the managers who’d navigated the pandemic, adapted their roles repeatedly, and were now being asked to set the standard for everyone around them. Their experiences shaped the architecture of the PEM Reset, which is precisely why the final design felt so immediately recognisable to the people who went through it.
Watching our colleagues share their insights after each element was almost spooky — the design and delivery pulled out the exact thoughts and behaviours they were designed to.”
Chloe Finlay
Learning Lead, Heathrow Airport
What we built together
The PEM Reset was a single, full-day immersive experience designed to reset, realign, and reconnect.
PEMs walked in through a corridor lined with hanging quotes from their own colleagues; honest reflections on the role, the culture, and the passenger experience. Before a facilitator had said a word, people felt heard and seen.
A bespoke airport board game challenged teams to take on sections of a real airport, mirroring the structure of their real-life roles, and ran operations for a simulated day. Strategic planning gave way to real-time dilemmas: the kinds of decisions PEMs face under pressure, with consequences that played out in front of the group. The game surfaced mindsets, behaviours, and decision-making patterns in a way that reflection exercises never quite reach. It also created the conditions for genuine learning: peers watching peers, making calls, seeing outcomes, and talking about what they noticed.
Woven throughout the day’s activities, colleagues gave recognition cards to each other, naming specific behaviours that had made a difference during the games. The mechanism was simple. Its effect was monumental. In a population that had spent two years in survival mode, being explicitly recognised by a peer for something positive created a sense of connection that didn’t disappear when the day ended.
The final session of the day was future-facing. Teams named the behaviours that defined what great looked like in their terminals and made commitments to bring them to life – a pledge between colleagues.
The results, and the ripple beyond them
Nine events. Over 250 Passenger Experience Managers. An average NPS of +55 with two of the events scoring a perfect +100.
The numbers a genuine shift in how people understood their roles and responsibilities, and each other.
The PEMs with the longest tenure engaged as fully as those with the shortest. The design didn’t make assumptions about who would benefit most; the discovery had revealed that the need ran across the entire population, regardless of experience.
The programme’s success was one of the factors that led to Solvd Together being named Heathrow’s Supplier of the Year in 2023. As much as we love the recognition for a job well done, the most rewarding moment was stepping back and watching what happened in the terminals when peak season arrived: a population of managers who had felt depleted walked back onto the floor re-energised, reconnected, and ready.
The PEMs were absolutely buzzing. It was something they’re not used to, something they’ve not seen before, and it’s something they didn’t expect. And the feedback showed the power of doing the discovery.”
Mustafa Abbas
Learning Lead, Heathrow
