When is it OK to ignore the elephant in the room? At what point should we acknowledge ‘I can’t cope’, or ‘dammit I’ve screwed up here’, and take action or make that call for help?
The security firm G4S are splashed all across the news here in the UK after seemingly goofing up the security recruitment and training plans for the Olympics. It’s not a minor slip, they are thousands of people short of their targets. In March 2011 G4S won a £284m contract to provide 13,700 guards, but only has 4,000 in place. It says a further 9,000 are in the pipeline. G4s revealed this two days ago, with just two weeks to go before the start of the biggest world sporting event, and yet as recently as May 2012 G4S was riding high as winner of Best Global Recruitment Strategy award at the Recruiter’s Awards for Excellence.
I expect this goof up will cost G4S dearly (although bizarrely there is no penalty clause for failure within the contract itself), but at least it serves as a powerful reminder to the rest of us. Too often in the workplace we wait for someone else to take a lead, or assume it’s someone else’s responsibility.
When you think something’s going badly wrong, whether it be malpractice, bullying, or just good old fashioned human error, take courage and say something.
Update:
The plot thickens. Since I wrote this post it has emerged that the UK Government were warned about difficulties with the recruiting process ten months ago. The warnings came from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, not the security company itself. So now the UK Government is under pressure to explain why it didn’t take the matter further. Much pointing of fingers is currently going on.
Great post Doug, and thanks for the link! We’ll be watching the pending Olympics and how the tv networks will be showing off London and the surrounding communitites. I hope this security issue doesn’t overshadow all of the excitement. Great message about taking a stand…its a personal and professional hot button for me!
Hi Jay – I’m looking forward to the Olympics very much. We’ll be going to see the cycling road race and some other stuff too. I was in the USA for the 2008 games and I missed most of it (too busy holidaying), but I did watch Rebecca Romero win gold for GB in the track cycling. I was in a bar in San Diego!
Always a pleasure to find a good excuse to link up with you 🙂
In just about every man-made catastrophe:
1. People can see it will happen, but don’t get the warning to those who can stop it. This either because they assume they must know and will do something, or because they try and cannot get through for various reasons, often because people will not listen either because they feel too busy, or think they know better.
2. The catastrophe will very nearly have happened several times before (the O-ring failure that led to the Challenger Shuttle disaster had failed on 11 of the previous 24 launches). The lessons of experience will not have been learned, for much the same reasons as above.
Doug,
In my previous life as an HR Manager for an airport, I used to recruit for the Airport Security personnel and all I can say at this juncture is that it’s a very time consuming and a laborious process, however a very simple one to implement like anything else once you know what you’re doing! We used to recruit in a cycle of 12 to 16 weeks from the D Day deadline of new recruits joining the company and being trained as Aviation Security Personnel.
I could not rely on some of the agencies/Security companies who were only too willing to supply the personnel as sub contractors (Who used to promise the earth and often did not deliver) as their methods were not stringent enough or timely enough to deliver results for me. Enough said! :-))
Thanks Jonathan and Bina, strikes me that G4S could have used your wisdom to great effect eh wot.