British Airways enables insight for everyone with Tableau

Competition between airlines is fierce, and British Airways aims to be the world leader. Smart use of data can give companies an edge and help them make the right decisions to get profits and passenger numbers back up.

Making insight accessible to everyone is a priority at British Airways to boost productivity and help staff achieve their potential.

Previously, a team of analysts supplied data to a limited audience of operational managers in an unstructured way. This was time-consuming and unsatisfying and meant key data points were not available to the majority of the ground staff. While the team had the right data, they needed a better way to visualise it to make it easier for ground staff to understand.

British Airways swapped spreadsheets and static presentations for Tableau dashboards and hasn’t looked back since. It uses extracts that refresh daily to give managers and individual staff access to the data they need to celebrate achievements and address development areas. To encourage user adoption, the data team provides regular in-person training.

Here are some examples of how employees use Tableau:

‘My Day @ BA’ is a user-friendly dashboard optimised for iPad that helps more than 2,000 employees and their managers track their performance. KPIs related to their role are displayed on one screen, and staff can tap on pop-ups for deeper insight. Typically, metrics are around safety, attendance, and compliance with training requirements, but it also tracks insights such as premium customer engagement, extra baggage sales, and airport upgrades sold in the terminal.

This level of visibility helped improve attendance–vital for all operational staff–by 2%, but the biggest impact has been on employee recognition, which saw up to 400% improvement. Unsurprisingly, ‘My Day @ BA’ is the most viewed dashboard of all time, as it displays data that is highly relevant to the individual in an approachable and user-friendly way.

The Data Visualisation team designed Tableau dashboards to look and feel like modern apps, taking inspiration from video games. This makes it easy to navigate and highlight accomplishments. For example, ‘My Day @ BA’ features a dedicated achievement section that replicates similar features on modern consoles – awarding the individual with a medal when they achieve high performance levels.

The team found that these achievements help motivate ground staff to offer upgrades and sell extra baggage allowance to passengers, especially when they can track their performance against peers. This uses a scatter graph visual, where staff in the top 10% are highlighted in the ‘gold zone’ and earn a trophy.

Managers can see their team’s achievements via their own customised management dashboard and regularly reach out to congratulate individuals as well as using these insights at end of year reviews.

One of the perks of working for an airline is getting discounted travel -- when there’s availability. The majority of these trips can’t be booked in advance and staff need to be on standby, ready to snap up a seat when it becomes available.

To help colleagues find flights, British Airlines launched a staff travel tool. Built on Tableau, it has the look and feel of an app and is integrated with SharePoint. It uses flight data to estimate the likelihood of getting onto a flight to a particular destination on a preferred date.

Previously, staff could spend hours assessing flights but the Staff Travel tool simplifies decision making with a traffic light system, helping identify seat availability quickly. In the future, the airline is considering using Explain Data, a feature that uses AI to interpret data in plain English. Staff could simply type ‘where is the best destination to go on this day’ or ‘when should I try and fly to this destination’ and get an AI-generated response.