The London Olympics Organizing Committee - Essay Example

Security firm stands accused of letting the country down (Insert Name) (Institution Affiliation) The 2012 London Olympics and the paralytic games that took place right after the Olympics was one of the greatest events ever held in the UK. However, the smooth operation and running of the games was thrown in to doubt around fourteen days prior to its opening after G4S, which was the principle security firm contracted, announced its inability to fulfill the contractual duties. This became one of the greatest challenges that faced the London Olympics organizing committee (LOCOG) (House-of-Commons, 2012). The failure of G4S to deliver its contractual commitment on this important occasion was a great matter of public concern. Perhaps the most significant area of public concern flows from the growing role that G4S plays in the criminal justice system and in public contracts more widely. The failure is thought to have been caused by a combination of internal and external factors (Wearden, 2012). One of the major internal reasons for the failure of G4S is Lack of good management skills, performance and attitude to follow through. For instance, Northedge submitted that G4S had specific management failings such as keeping in touch trained staff, responding to job application, with and recruiting sufficient personnel. G4S was awarded the contract sometime in December 2010 and was required to recruit around 2000 new staff and facilitate training and manage a workforce of ten thousand originally but the situation change later requiring them to manage a workforce of 23,700 staff. But despite the early warnings, the management within G4S failed to monitor the progress through which each security personnel had to go through. Report by LOCOG indicated that there were several problems with the way G4S recruited, trained and the overall communication was poor (House-of-Commons, 2012). This was evident since G4S according to the contract was commissioned to train 10,400 guards but only managed to train 4,200 which was less than a half of what was expected. Poor judgment in new opportunity market by managers was also apparent within G4S. For instance, even though G4S have proven to be highly efficient in the delivery of regular security business, but they had difficulties in the recognition of the structures, processes needed augmenting for the Olympics. There was a multi stages process involved in the task that included recruitment, accreditation, training and finally deployment (Northedge, 2012). The failure by the G4S management to keep check on how many personnel were progressing led to inaccurate information that misguided the London organizing committee about the true nature of the problem. Despite the early warnings, G4S continued to produce false data that showed that there was no serious problem. G4S insisted there has been an unprecedented and very complex deployment exercise, which has been carried out to a tight timescale and they have encountered some issues in scheduling security guards over the last couple of weeks. For instance Charles Farr told us that, on 1 July, he was given data that showed that 37,000 people had passed the G4S interview, 25,000 had been security screened, 21000 had been accredited, 14700 had been SIA trained and 9,000 were ready to work (HoC, 2012). Lack of proper communication was another apparent cause of failure. The potential employees or the new recruits were not informed about the areas they would be deployed. May talented people and ex-policemen take other jobs due to the uncertainty of whether G4S would use their services. While this being a recipe for the general failure, it also portrays extremely poor personnel practices and management within the company. Poor communication also had a great impact on the prospective employees who went through recruitment, screening and training processes in good faith and ended up jobless at the end due to poor management in G4S. The management structure in place was inadequate to address the complexity and scale of the project. For instance, Screening assumed to take 3 weeks, actually took 12 week. According to G4S management team, one major failure was to not appoint a Programme Director to coordinate the process. The used of mixed workforce most of whom were not G4S employees required someone with management experience to ensure proper coordination. G4S acknowledged that it was solely responsible for its failure to deliver the contract terms and requirements. Indeed, G4S wanted to take advantage of the loose labour market environment, (high unemployment and employers have increased bargaining power) by offering such a low pay of £8.50 which did not attract people enough, even though they were paid £300 million to provide 10,000 security guards (Hughes & Pettifor, 2012). This discouraged many people who had prior security training from applying for the post and according to the mirror news; almost 99% of the applicants had no security training or experience at all. Furthermore, ineffective allocation of personnel and resources and poor workforce management contributed much to the G4S failure to deliver. This forced the London Olympic organizing committee to deploy military and police forces and undertake the extra burden of reimbursing them for all cost including accommodation. There were some transport problems during the games such as the Olympics lanes on the road that were used to facilitate the transportation of athletes from their accommodations to the venues created some severe traffics during the games. Despite the overall success in hosting the event, the blame for the failure of G4S to honour its contract and letting down the country rest solely on the company’s management. The company was awarded the contract due to its size and reputation and although the contract could be awarded through bidding, G4S was the most suitable candidate. It is understandable that G4S, after taking a £50 million loss on the Games, alongside a significant fall in its share price, should now seek to minimize the scale of any further losses. But we believe that the company should look to the bigger picture and its long standing relationship with taxpayer, who is its biggest client in the United Kingdom (Wearden, 2012). In fact, G4S should have carried out a study tour of the previous Olympics hosts to seek understanding of the security structures and processes undertaken in term of man power, materials needs and time management. To avoid such failures from occurring in future, G4S need to reorganize and restructure its internal staff components in order to create a more robust and well-structured outfit. It should liaise, recruit, screen and train appropriate number of staff in order to maintain its reputation in the region. As a matter of fact, G4S should have outsourced some of the duties in the contact to other credible private security firms when it became apparent that it would not be able to fulfill them and none of the above could have happened. References House-of-Commons. (2012). Seventh Report of Session 2012–13. London: House of Commons. Hughes, C., & Pettifor, T. (2012, Jully 13 ). London 2012 Olympics. Retrieved November 22, 2012, from Mirror: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/g4s-olympics-security-fiasco-firm-1141427 Northedge, R. (2012, July 18). The Edge. Retrieved November 23, 2012, from Director of Finance online: http://dofonline.co.uk/blogs/the-edge/entertainment/g4s-olympic-staff-stay-at-home-343242/ Wearden, G. (2012, September 28). Senior G4S executives resign over Olympics security failure. Retrieved January 23, 2013, from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/28/g4s-executives-resign-olympics-security-failure Read More