The never-ending nightshift: Insights into organisational adaptation during COVID-19

Abstract

Air traffic control organisations played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic, working to ensure the safety of the air traffic that continued to operate, despite the significant decrease in the number of flights. Air traffic control organisations implemented various measures to address the pandemic’s challenges and these measures maintained high levels of safety and operational efficiency whilst reducing the risk of virus transmission among staff. This paper uses unique access to interviews with senior decision makers, organisational data and industrial insights to explore the adaptations that occurred to air traffic control in the UK to manage the unprecedented crisis. The application of Critical Decision Method (CDM) paired with a set of adaptation factors is used to explore and help understand this organisational response and the synthesised results form a unique narrative of safety–critical decision-making under uncertainty. The paper presents valuable insights for human factors practitioners on how adaptation is an essential component of safety management in complex sociotechnical systems and provides examples of practices that could be applied in other domains. Furthermore, the paper sets out how balancing adaptive forces provide a possible explanation of adaptive capability in organisations and suggests a future direction for safety management practices.