Personnel needs fixing

[Vanquo]

Personnel metrics and its impacts on brand image need fixing. I use the "set suggested wages" option and my company went from 60 image to now -52 and decreasing....all because I set wages to suggested i.e. market levels

[Vanquo]

Basically until something changes setting wages to suggested levels is a game ending button.

[groundbum2]

it honestly doesn't work that way, or did you give people a paycut? Pay only goes up as far as I've seen. Were some staff also fired? That is well documented to badly affect CI, and there is even a warning popup when attempted. I would suggest something else is going on.

Simon

[Karl]

Something is wrong.  There are way more bankruptcies than in the past. 

[Sami]

Personnel metrics and its impacts on brand image need fixing. I use the "set suggested wages" option and my company went from 60 image to now -52 and decreasing....all because I set wages to suggested i.e. market levels

There is clear warning when you attempt to lower salaries or sack staff. These will a) affect staff morale and b) affect company image.

The actual salaries you have paid previously might be also higher than the "market" salary, and "resetting" them might in some cases indeed mean a pay decrease, and naturally nobody likes paycuts and thus there are negative effects associated with that.

So it's working as intended.

[Karl]

Is my perception wrong that there are more bankruptcies than usual - especially in "The Age of Flight?

It seems to me that a new airline cannot get a foothold in the game.  Any hub with a decent load factor seems to be dominated by two or more mega carriers with no slots available at a decent hour or if they are available, they are very expensive.  Even small airports with decent load factor availability are dominated from major airports by mega airlines - even, it seems, that they fly big capacity aircraft to cities with a load factor of 40 passengers per day.

What keeps new players coming back under these conditions- if they do continue to play?

[Vanquo]

There is clear warning when you attempt to lower salaries or sack staff. These will a) affect staff morale and b) affect company image.

The actual salaries you have paid peevioualy might be also higher than the "market" salary, and "resetting" them might in some cases indeed mean a pay decrease, and naturally nobody likes paycuts and thus there are negative effects associated with that.

So it's working as intended.

This is true but if I'd known it would take my airline from +60 to what is now -70 and dropping I would never have clicked the button. It basically functions as an airline self destruct button at the moment it would seem. I've tried raising salaries from the automated suggested wages value but company image is still trending towards zero.

Other company image maluses have made Sense and been proportional.

[knobbygb]

It's always worked like this and many people have found out the hard way. Although there is a warning, I can see why the OP might not realise just how much an effect this would have.  I just checked my salaries, which have been on 'auto' since the start of the game and they nearly all range from 20% to 45% above the "suggested rate". Funnily 'Customer Services' are exactly as they 'should be' though.

One way round this (I did it once) it to very slowly lower the salaries - like by 1% at at a time, over many months. The small drops in image can either be ignored or managed by paying one-time bonuses to make the staff happy again. I've never really come to a conclusion as to the best way to handle this though, so I usually just ignore it. I seem to remember that it just caused the staff to demand bigger raises. 

Anyway, your airline should be in enough profit that it doesn't really matter. A quick calculation shows that my staff costs are currently 14.1% of my turnover and if I managed to cut all wages by 25% they would still be 10.6% of turnover giving me 3.5% more Gross Profit or about 3.3% net. If this extra saving could make a big difference to your airline then your time might be better spent fixing other, more fundamental problems.

Yeah, I agree though that the whole staffing thing needs an overhaul. It's been pretty much the same since the very start and really doesn't reflect how things happen in the real world. For example, there is no "economy of scale" - the same number of staff are hired to cover your 500th aircraft as for your 5th.  It just shouldn't be a 'linear' relationship. Some of the "scaling" issues have been somewhat fixed with the recent commonality changes, so maybe it's now time to fix staffing?

[Vanquo]

How do I increase CI now that it's down at -77? I returned salaries to automated and it's still low

[Karl]

In the many years I have been participating in this simulation, I had never - until recently - seen a negative CI until one of my airlines achieved a -4 CI

Tell me nothing has changed?

[john2020]

How do I increase CI now that it's down at -77? I returned salaries to automated and it's still low

Heavy marketing for your airline will increase CI; think of spending big with TV and radio advertising!

[Vanquo]

In the many years I have been participating in this simulation, I had never - until recently - seen a negative CI until one of my airlines achieved a -4 CI

Tell me nothing has changed?

try -77 it's fun. Airlines with planes falling out the sky are more appealing to customers.

[Vanquo]

What definitely doesn't seem right in the calc is that whatever hit I took to company image, happened twice because I clicked suggested wages twice. Which doesn't make sense because the dollar amount in salary wasn't changed, yet there's a noticeable second drop in company image even though not change to salary was realized or effected.