When Sarah Hodge volunteered for London 2012, her experience as an operational FM and facilities project manager proved invaluable in a crucial role within the Olympic Stadium. Martin Read reports.
Although Sarah Hodge has more than 20 years’ experience in FM and project management she is, perhaps more importantly, a passionate East Londoner. And having lived locally to the Stratford site for most of her life, volunteering her services for the biggest facilities project to ever happen in her ‘manor’ — the Olympic Games of London 2012 — was a natural step.
“I knew as soon as the bid was put together that I wanted to be involved,” says Hodge. “I just had to be. I’ve always been an East Londoner at heart.”
Sarah already had experience of regeneration projects local to the main Stratford site — including the first registered social landlord project, Poplar HARCA.
She had an affinity with the work that needed to be done at Stratford and even a marital connection, with the building in which her husband’s printing firm was situated, on the edge of the Olympic site, being demolished as part of the plans.
Applying to volunteer using the electronic application process wasn’t easy. Prospective volunteers had little space in which to detail their specialisms and it was difficult to second-guess what selectors would be looking for.
Nevertheless, in February of 2010, Sarah was selected for interview in a process that culminated in a formal appointment nearly two years later.
Between those dates, Sarah was asked to train some of the leadership, but “it was only after another two security-based interviews that I realised I had a serious role, although I still wasn’t sure what.”
In January 2012, Sarah was appointed as protocol team leader in the Olympic Stadium. In this capacity, she would be managing the team dealing with the hundreds of dignitaries visiting the special VIP sections of the Olympic stadium. Volunteers reporting to her would include translators from across the world.
Train to gain
Sarah had already taken some of the training modules required of the volunteer workforce. “The cascade training was amazing and the training material provided by McDonalds’ was fantastic,” she says.
“Everyone who was selected got orientation training and that was very much the overall motivation piece. Then we had role-specific training, which was all about the golden threads of behaviours and how you demonstrate them in your specific role.”
Finally there was venue-specific training, involving the translation of those golden rules into how they would be interpreted in their particular venue. According to Sarah, “it was very good training that made it abundantly clear who in the organisational structure you would be reporting to at your specific venue.”
Interestingly, the Olympic Games’ deploy a permanent, revolving core of management. “This is the paid team and they sit at the top of the organisational tree,” says Sarah. “It means there’s a common thread between games which helps a lot with protocol issues.”
Quick Facts
70,000 Olympic volunteers
38 venues across the UK
The way it works is that people from the most recent games, the current games and the games to come in four years’ time are all involved. So in London, people who had managed the Beijing Olympics were working with their Rio 2016 counterparts as well as London 2012’s own management team. In Rio, London’s representatives will serve as the ‘old guard’, while part of the team will include people from whichever city has by then won the 2020 bid.
This system of management serves for both the winter and summer games and is well-honed. As protocol team leader, Sarah was given leadership training on how to motivate her charges, and it’s here that the connection to FM was most overt.
The FM advantage
“The connection between managing a facilities team and managing volunteers, as I was, is the sheer diversity of the team members,” says Sarah. “In the stadium, my team comprised doctors, scientists, students, physicians and others. Just as with an FM team, you might have cleaners studying to be lawyers, or hoping to get into medicine, for example.”
“When you have such a diversity of backgrounds, understanding what their motivations are and making their time with you the best it can be is actually quite a challenge. And of course at the Olympics, people had so many different reasons for being there.”
This is where experience as an operational FM gave Sarah an edge. “For some of the other volunteer managers, whose experience was of managing a particular type of individual, the ability to adapt to deal with so many different character and background types was perhaps more of a challenge.”
Key to managing volunteers is maintaining their initial levels of enthusiasm. “At the beginning, everyone was on such a high.
But by the halfway stage they were exhausted. By the second week it was a question of keeping everyone motivated as they sensed the Olympic experience coming to an end. As a manager, that’s quite an unusual thing to have to deal with, but I understood that cycle from my FM days.
“The key is to get to know your team in the quiet times; understand why they’re there. Understanding that there are going to be cycles of enthusiasm and dealing with that is the role of the manager and leader.”
A bittersweet ending
Nevertheless, the impending end of the Olympic journey was difficult for those volunteers, suddenly coming to terms with the fact that they’d soon be departing the extraordinary bubble London 2012 had been.
Keeping morale up meant reprising the motivational training from earlier. According to Sarah: “After every single session I’d remind them why they had wanted to volunteer in the first place and that they’d remember the whole of this experience for the rest of their lives. A lot of people had made some amazing connections, both personal and business.”
Maintaining enthusiasm also meant being attuned to individuals’ specific triggers, giving them something specific to do. In Sarah’s case, this meant getting the language girls into the media ‘mix zone’ to translate an interview with one of their own country’s athletes (“that would make their week,” says Sarah). And if a member of the team wanted to meet royalty or some other representative from their country, Sarah would make sure that person was invited to be present when those representatives were on site.
London 2012 is over, but Sarah’s own memories are vivid.
“The biggest issue we had every night was that we were dealing with people who were accredited, but didn’t have specific seat tickets. So we might have 2,500 seats available but 10,000 people who wanted to come in. That proved testing at times, with a king or two asking if we knew who they were.
It was particularly difficult to manage around the times of the ‘big ticket’ events — the 100m and 200m finals, and that middle Saturday when Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah were running. Sarah confesses that having the army present helped to diffuse tensions when controlling the flow of dignitaries had left some people hot under the collar.
“Also, we lost Mick Jagger,” says Sarah, calmly. “We knew he was due to arrive, but a man rushed in asking if we’d seen him so we realised no one knew where he was. There was a bit of a panic until we found out he’d decided to come in via the public entrance and had been swamped by fans.”
Lessons learned
In the darkness of a wet October, it’s difficult to believe just how successful the Olympics were. As an experienced trainer and consultant, to what does Sarah attribute the success of London 2012?
“From the very start, the vision and outcomes were so clearly communicated, and they never changed. We were here to deliver the best games we could and that was translated into certain golden threads and rules of behaviour — this was to be best two weeks of our lives.” And what has Sarah herself learnt from the process?
“It reinforced my belief that leading diverse teams to consistently deliver at the front line is not about money, but much more about focusing on every single person at every level. It’s about understanding and delivering the same vision and each person knowing their role is critical.
“It shows what can be achieved if everyone in the team wants and believes it can happen. It’s vital that every single member of the team is valued for their contribution.
The London Olympics showed just how important that mantra is.
