From our June 2012 print magazine: we meet Grainne Kelly, the security company Securitas’s area director Scotland, who talked to Mark Rowe in Glasgow.
She began by talking me through the local, national and global aspects of the company’s work in Scotland. A national customer – a retailer for example – will have dedicated branches, each under a branch manger, ‘and they are empowered to look after their branch. They are the entrepreneur of that particular area’. I asked about Aberdeen, where much of the work and that region’s economy is tied up with the (still flourishing) oil and gas sector. That makes it different from the rest of Scotland and indeed the UK. Unemployment there is still low, lower than in the central belt of Scotland.
“Aberdeen is an interesting point,” she said, “because Aberdeen customers won’t do business with someone who isn’t based in Aberdeen. They want to have somebody local, that knows the area, and knows the business. We recently talked to a prospect in Aberdeen and they knew of us and made it very clear that it was very important to them that it was local people that were involved and it was not done from London. So it proves the point, of how important it is to be local. Don’t get me wrong, Glasgow and Edinburgh are similar, but not quite as strong as Aberdeen – they do want people in their doorstep that they can ring up.” With the oil and gas sector in and around Aberdeen comes more of a slant to health and safety than in some other security guarding work, not only in protecting sites but in responding to hazards. It may be that the call from an offshore platform about an incident comes first to Security, who then call out teams to deal with any emergency. While we cannot say that wintry weather only happens north of Carlisle and Berwick, Scotland is more likely to face cold and snow for longer than, say, Kent. That may mean that Securitas places officers in bed and breakfasts, rather than struggle through the most extreme weather between the workplace and home.
I asked her what was a typical week in her working life, if there was such a thing. It does involve much travel, as she will spend perhaps two or three days a week in Aberdeen, and visiting customers, whether in the ‘central belt’ of Glasgow and Edinburgh and place in between, or elsewhere such as Stranraer. Travel is for a mixture of reasons; to lead and manage her teams, as branches have to feel supported, and guided – to understand the bigger picture, in a word – and likewise customers have to be seen. Things can crop up and diaries can fill up, ‘incredibly quickly; people want to see you so you have to be very organised,’ she said, ‘to make sure you don’t double-book yourself’. I asked if it was the case that you could work 200 hours a week and still not do all you could do? She answered in terms of planning; setting out what she wants to achieve in the next month. Likewise branch managers will have quarterly objectives – because if you don’t set such targets, life has a way of going on and before you know it, a year has passed. “So it’s really important to plan and review and check.” So even if you do not do something, you keep it in the plan for next time. Similarly, a review allows you to recall what you have achieved, as good for morale, rather than moving on to the next three months, the next target. Because for one thing, you can be sure that something will come up, not expected – whether for you or the customer. You need to have processes in place to minimise any effects; and a customer has to have trust in you, the provider of a service, that you are on top of the incident straight away. Which brings us back to being local. Grainne did not set out to work in security: “When I did my degree I very much focused on retail; I wanted to work in the retail industry. But when I worked there it was very structured; there was very little chance of making a difference.” She applied for a job not knowing it was in security. She still feels it’s a very male-dominated industry; on the ground, security work is tough; ‘and it is an out of hours industry, and you have to be prepared to do that’. She’s married, and has three children. Again, you have to be organised and plan, ‘and you have to make sure you are focusing in the right areas at the right time’. Yes, mobile phones and email have come in, in Grainne’s time, and email has a place – for sending a tender quick, for example – but as she added, email cannot beat speaking by phone, or meeting face to face. An email can be mis-read, or sent in haste. Grainne wondered out loud if we ought to have an email-free day sometimes.
Securitas employs some1500 people in Scotland, securing some 357 sites. I asked her to give me a flavour of Scotland. Customers are looking for savings, because of the (economic) climate, she replied: “Because our industry as you know is heavily based on payment of officers and wages; the only way to give customers savings is to look t things slightly differently. What can we bring in technology, where can we bring in mobile response and assistance; and actually look at their total package. And that is definitely the way forward.” Customers, she went on, have high expectations; they expect officers well trained, whether in first aid, or fire safety, or use of defibrillators; ‘and security now is very different from what it used to be. I think the industry has moved on hugely; licensing has helped with that, but it also has a lot to do with the economy, and people having to get more for their money’.
She can make comparisons between Scotland and England as she has worked besides in Manchester. I asked about privatisation of the police, the main article in the April issue of Professional Security. Of a piece with the likely contracting out of police work, to save money, Scotland is to have one police force replacing the several. She expects the privatisation to come, though it may take more time in Scotland to overcome reluctance than in England and Wales. While I did not expect her or indeed Securitas to give a view on the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) government in Edinburgh’s call for independence, ahead of a national vote, the subject did crop up. What Grainne said about customers (local or global) wanting a local service might speak of a desire for an independent Scotland; or not. You can be from Zambia and satisfy customers, if you are based in Aberdeen. Grainne said – and it was dawning on me thanks to her accent – that she came from Ireland. “I went to university in Stirling and got a first class honours degree in business studies; and then I worked for Safeway as a management trainee for four years; so I have been in the security industry now for 18 years; so quite a long time. And it has been interesting; it has changed dramatically, in my opinion. Customers 18 years ago really weren’t interested whether someone [in security] was trained for their site; their expectations were much, much lower; it was more of a body, a bum on a seat. Standards have improved, across the board, customers’ expectations have improved across the board, what they expect their officers to do.” The contract company has taken over many in-house guarding teams. All that said, she adds that there is a long way to go; she wonders if people outside the security industry appreciate how important the industry is. One reason, as she raises, might be the way security guards are shown (if they ever are) on TV; but here, too, things are better than they were. Officers do some brave, even life-saving feats in an emergency, as honoured by the BSIA officer of the year awards each summer, and Securitas has had its share of regional and national winners over the years. The company is running an annual ceremony of its own, community awards, sponsored by customers, as a way of marking the outstanding acts of officers. One impact of SIA (Security Industry Authority) regulation has been on badged employees, Grainne suggests. She says turnover of staff, movement of guards between companies, has been much less since the SIA licence came in.
To speak further on the now UK-wide SIA badging. As background, Scotland (whether cannily or because of official slowness) had its badging of licensable sectors later than England and Wales. Then, and since the Westminster Coalition has set off the train of events leading to a new SIA regime, the Scottish Government has fallen in with the wider British licensing, rather than give us the prospect of a guard in Carlisle needing one badge to work a door in Cumbria and another in Gretna.
To return to Grainne: she said that (since it started there in 2007) the SIA has had a definite impact in Scotland. “There are fewer companies; a lot of the small companies have disappeared, especially the smaller ones you could call rogue security companies.” That security guarding and door firms – and non-security firms such as taxis – were fronts and vehicles for organised crime in central Scotland, and in fairness in Liverpool and some other cities, was among the reasons for SIA regulation in the first place. There is a sense that while such rogue security operators or cowboys or criminals, or whatever you want to call them, have not gone away altogether, the SIA regime and enforcement work with police has tackled that end of the sector. As Grainne said, the Scottish Government has set out that only SIA-approved contractors can have government work. That decision has practical and symbolic sides; the Edinburgh Government is giving work to some and not others, and giving meaning to the Approved Contractor Scheme.
I asked what she could foresee. Certainly, margins in the guarding industry 18 years ago were much higher than they are now; guarding has been squeezed; but Grainne believes that such things are cyclical. Customers are looking at their suppliers; can they do security differently; with technology, and fewer officers of a higher calibre, who work different systems and have a more important role; and customers will want to pay more for that. To mention one development of the Securitas branches, and an example of the entrepreneurship inside the company; Scotland since January has had an ‘ad hoc’ branch. Officers associated with that branch are on contracts whereby they know they are doing ad hoc work; and they have to have the training so that they can work at one site then another at short notice. “And we sell it and have been quite successful.” As any contract guarding firm will know, sometimes it is hard to truly offer a last minute service, though the person on the line asking for ad hoc officers that night may be a good customer, or have the makings of becoming a regular customer; and the margin may well be good. A shop may be having a re-fit, or an engineer is working at a building out of hours, and a guard is required to sit in. It can be hard for a branch manger and for the officer to meet demands. Plainly the thinking of Securitas – and Scotland is trialling the ‘ad hoc branch’ idea for the rest of the country – is that an ad hoc-only branch can attend to ad hoc requests better than a standard branch with its officers for core customers, and relief officers. How can a branch, with the best will, plan for something ad hoc, without running the risk of upsetting a core customer?!
‘It’s a very rewarding job,’ she said, ‘it’s a very rewarding industry to be in.’ While it may sound obvious, it’s a people business, and getting the most out of people, doing right things, even little things, or doing one thing and not another, can have an impact on others. Nor should we under-estimate the impact we have on others. Grainne gives an example of going to the funeral a couple of years ago of a security officer from the days when she was an operations manager; for Reliance; Grainne came to Securitas through the recent acquisition by Securitas of the guarding arm of Reliance. The deceased man’s son talked to Grainne, of how his father had spoken of her, and now he had met her. “That meant a lot because that’s when I realised how important you can be to someone.”
