What
@jb747 describes is sadly, in my experience, all too common.
I've bee there myself in various forms of the "We are listening to you" (but really aren't) from management - at various organisations in various roles.
Either there's a plan in place with a desired outcome - and thus any "feedback" or "comments on proposals" are purely solicited for the purposes of show and the appearances of being an employer that consults(no pun intended) with its staff and is genuine about feedback, or there is a genuine intent to perhaps "listen" to what employees have to say, but they either don't like the feedback (usually negative
) or the feedback is sometimes impractical, no budget, etc.
And then there's the type of management (and this kind led to my departure from my last role) who don't even bother to even pretend to listen, but come in, steamroll over everyone and everything, ignore years, sometimes decades of experience in particular areas because "they know better" and have a senior role, and even when feedback is made, it's directly ignored, or even overridden. I had all of that literally. Incredibly disrespectful and a quick way to destroy employee morale and investment in a work environment where not only are the loyal employees dismissed out of hand, but actively silenced in one way or another. I'll give one example which was the last straw for me. I'm in IT, and new management decided they wished to (in theory) make things more redundant by moving some core infrastructure services into the cloud. Now, when I say "core" I mean, nothing will work without this particular item. So, with this edict in place, and all counter arguments dismissed (and not in a polite way), I drew up an implementation plan. As part of this, I planned for an on site redundancy should access to the cloud fail for whatever reason - using existing systems at at zero cost to do so (and it was pretty much set up anyway). Well, of course, the plan was rejected and there was no way, no how that this was to be a thing for the new senior management. Well, I very shortly thereafter (for various reasons, not just this) told them where they could stick it since clearly my technical knowledge and experience were of no value to these people who decided they knew better. What do you know, literally a month later. Just a month, after they'd made their own changes, the organisation's internet links were disrupted for 12-18 hours due to a provider issue out of their control. Of course, with access to the cloud lost, and no onsite redundancy capability, everything collapsed in a great big pile of whatever that orange-brown slop is they serve in SYD dom J lounge. I had to both laugh and cry - laugh because yeah, I freakin' told them so and would have potentially saved at least SOME of the pain points from the outage, and cry for everyone affected by senior management's attitudes and how it had come back to bite them on the backside (and so quickly?!). I was out, but I heard allll about it and just shook my head.
So anyway back to QF, it seems that - from the outside at least - QF's senior team is more our way or the high way types, an it would be quite interesting to know the terms of the contract with McKinsey - ie What are the objectives from the board and Senior Management for the process and required outcomes - because VH can say in public whatever she wants, but the devil is in the detail. I seriously doubt any consulting firm is being brought in for really truly constructive and positive change, but more likely to help drive the business in the direction already set out in the strategic plan for the next x years (say 2024-28) and to find ways to push this stuff through.
Now sometimes this can be good and have useful input from "fresh eyes" outside of the bubble - but more often than not the opportunity for things like this are stifled before they have a chance by terms of reference of the consultancy.
So I guess we'll see, but I expect very little out of this big $ item than will change much from the direction we already see things going.
(and final thought - this will all be about big picture items and the like rather than individual items like the check in experience, printing of BP's and so on. I expect it's more higher level concept guff like "commitment to customers" and so on with vague language but who knows about implementation and practical changes on the ground. Same with Staff - whoose treatment and support MUST be a vital component of any doover.
time will tell.