Annual turnover: 1.1 billion to end September 2001
HR director: Irene Cowden
When a Securicor van pulls up outside your local bank branch, your first instinct may be to look for the gang of robbers with sawn-off shotguns bursting on to the scene, as in so many past episodes of The Sweeney. But that image would be as outdated as the clothes worn by detectives Regan and Carter. Look now and Securicor has grown enormously in the past few years, from the long-established UK-based security firm, to a major international player, operating in 44 countries and employing 125,00 people. Security for buildings, high-tech systems for moving prisoners, and sophisticated cash management are what it is all about today. Acquisitions around the world, particularly in the past four years, have seen the business double in size. But absorbing all these new recruits has not been simply a process of imposing a UK-centric vision on new employees from Asia, Africa and America.
An evolutionary approach has helped the firm to grow
You have to realise that sometimes the firm you are acquiring will have its own very good way of doing things, says group HR director Irene Cowden. Your values have to evolve to take account of the new people coming on board. We try to acquire well-established businesses that have been well-managed we must not presume that we will always know best, she says.
It is that evolutionary approach which has helped the firm to grow, and helped Cowden build her successful career at the firm. Her HR team is a strictly strategic operator she has only three people who report to her directly. There are a further 10 HR directors at divisional level who are much more hands-on as far as the individual business units are concerned.
We believe that our businesses need autonomy if they are going to succeed in their local market, Cowden says. Of course there are HR practices that are common to us all performance management, co-ordination of values and we make sure that these things are happening across the business as a whole. So its a light touch strategic overview that her team offers? Possibly light touch, but also very influential, she emphasises.
Encouraging employee involvement in raising standards
The development of a staff association typifies the levels of employee involvement Cowden is keen to promote. One of the most successful recent initiatives was a project called Raising the Standard, which was driven by employees as well as by managers. It focused on some of the apparently smaller details uniforms, appearance, cleanliness of vehicles and so on that may seem banal but actually reveal so much about professional standards.
Customers have become much more demanding, Cowden says. When we recruit we are looking for the interpersonal skills and attitude that really matter in a business like this. Raising the Standard caught the imagination of a lot of staff and had a positive effect in boosting performance.
