26 Feb. 2019; At Sea.

The wind fell away during the night and then the seas quickly abated and thus today we had a normal sea day. That made for a busy day in the shops as quite a few of our guests had to catch up on souvenirs and logo wear for at home. In the Canal the shops had a stand on the Lido deck with Panama Canal logo wear and trinkets and some of it was also on display in the shops today. Looking at the activity today, ……………..it was good to have a backup day………………….. The 900 people of the Canal tour had to catch up sometime.

I am currently involved in a whole series of refresher courses for the crew. They get training and refresher courses from their Team Leaders but a new face (or in my case a very old face) in front of the group helps to re-focus. Plus if there is anything going on that the crew is worried about, or finds that it needs attention then I normally get to hear about it during these trainings as they all know that I have direct lines going everywhere.  The Zuiderdam is a happy crew, and so is the crew on the other HAL ships. And the company works hard to keep it like that. Plus the door of the Captain and the ships staff is always open. But ships crews are sailors. And sailors gossip, moan and groan and complain. And moan and groan they do. And they like to moan and groan to me, as I stand with one foot in the ship and with one foot in corporate.

They work for a company who strives to give 110% and thus the crew is looking at giving that 110% as well.  So on a regular basis I am appointed as Job order manager if there is something that does not get fixed quickly enough (read yesterday). Most of the times the things are already in the pipe line but there has been no feed back to the crew member concerned. Why?? Most supervisors and managers try. But regular crew has no company email or mobile house phone and so they are not always easy to find. And then if something else happens that needs the immediate focus of the manager concerned, then things can be forgotten. So when I inquire about the follow up, the answer is quite often “I could not find the person, otherwise he / she would have known that we are waiting for spare parts”. It is always about Communication.

When there are queries and grievances, the company has a very good system for follow up. For the regular crew we have Unit Meetings.  A  Unit is a group of crew members who represent a certain part of the crew. We hire most of our crew in Indonesia and the Philippines. For that we use local unions. Through them we organize the pay levels, the pay structure, and the obligations and benefits.  The crew works full time for us and some of them already more than 30 years but with larger groups you need a mechanism to ensure that everybody is treated the same way and fairly. So all our Indonesians are part of the same union and on each ship, there are 4 or 5 crew who make up the UNIT.  They are voted in by the crew and they hold sub-meetings to gather topics for the monthly unit meeting with the captain.  These meetings are normally not very long as most items can be quickly resolved.  The meetings only take longer when contracts or procedures have changed.  That gets communicated to the crew as best as we can but there are always questions. And then the captain takes the time (with his ships staff and the Human Resources Manager) to explain things or forward queries to the office.   It is always about communication.

On a regular basis we do a “fill a lifeboat” exercise so all crew know how to load a lifeboat and what it is to sit in one.

The same goes for our trainings. The biggest challenge we have is to make trainings realistic. And with lifeboats that is not easy as we cannot put 140 guests inside and exercise for real. So we do it with the crew but they know what is going on and they are trained themselves. Guests only get the basic safety briefing. If they would be in the lifeboat then we do not expect that they are all going to be quiet and attentive and thus the lifeboat crew has to learn to make themselves known and communicate properly over a lot of noise.

For that we have closed loop. Each order or question is repeated by the receiver. And if it is repeated, the sender says Yes. If the order is not repeated that it means the receiver has not heard it and then the order has to be given again. Same if the order is repeated but the sender is not acknowledging it by saying YES. Then the receiver knows his/her answer has not made it back to the sender so he/she has to repeat it again. This is something that was originally developed in the Airplane industry; then it came to the bridges of the ships, and now we roll it out over the whole ship.  It only costs a few seconds to do and it prevents a lot of mistakes. Especially as we have a lot of different nationalities and accents on board who sometimes have a peculiar idea about pronunciation. (Even in the same language. New Jersey talking to Alabama can be quite an eye opener) It is always about communication.

A nice diagram out of the Training industry.

Tomorrow we are back in our home port Fort Lauderdale. As we are on a 10 and 11 day schedule it means that only every other call we get here in the weekend, so tomorrow we are all by ourselves. Only 2000 guests coming in and going out. (And it will be less as there is a fair amount of CVG guests on board)

The weather is not as exciting as we were hoping fore as we are expecting rain in the morning, just before arrival but also around 1400 hrs. and that is when the guests are still coming in. it will not affect the temperatures that much. Still warm:  26oC /79oF.