Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62199
ing that sentence, how does that posture affect the way I view the education I'm pursuing for my degree? I wouldn't want it to turn anybody off, because a degree is certainly not a detriment to getting hired at Southwest! However, if you came to us with 18 degrees and your attitude didn't fit the behavior that we wanted to see, you wouldn't be hired. I think if I were a student and I read that statement, I would say, "If I go in there with a degree, and I have a great attitude, I should be ahead of everybody else." You fly to all of Southwest's cities to meet with employees and personally send all of them birthday cards. Clearly it's important to you for the company to show loyalty to its employees. What kind of loyalty does that net you in return? First of all, we don't do any of that to earn loyalty. We do it because we've talked to our employees from day one about being one big family. If you stop and think about it for even 20 seconds, the things we do are things you would do with your own families. We try to acknowledge and react to any significant event in our brothers' or sisters' lives, whether it's work-related or personal. We do the traditional things, like sending birthday cards and cards on the anniversary of their date of hire. But if employees have a child who's sick or a death in the family, we do our best to acknowledge it. We celebrate with our employees when good things happen, and we grieve with them when they experience something devas- tating. You cannot publish the kind of mission statement we have posted all over our walls and talk about our core values, and then not do these types of things. We have a very young workforce, and many of our employ- ees don't have any basis for comparing their work experience. BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2003 19