BC Business
You think your company’s got HR challenges? Try VANOC, which will have gone from zero to 50,000 and back to zero employees by the end of the Olympics roller-coaster.
Back in his native Sweden, Magnus Alvarsson had an uncle who was a sailor. Much like himself, Alvarsson says, his uncle had a hard time settling down. And while Alvarsson is no sailor, he has charted a similarly nomadic course in recent years as chief integrator for global IT firm Atos Origin SA. He is, as they are fondly called within VANOC, a Games Gypsy: one of a special breed who wanders the world from one major sporting event to another.
The volunteer drive for the 2010 Olympics is being called Canada’s biggest-ever volunteer effort outside of a war. The fact that VANOC plans to employ an estimated 25,000 free labourers is difficult enough to mentally conjure, but consider that it received more than 65,000 applications. While many of those applicants likely dropped off on their own, it still leaves tens of thousands who are willing to work for free for the Games and simply won’t be able to. “We’re in a very enviable position,” admits Allen Vansen, VANOC’s vice-president of workforce operations and integrations, who makes sure that every department in VANOC gets the manpower it needs. “We can certainly select the cream of the crop.”
The drive officially opened in February 2008, with recruiting partner Workopolis facilitating the online application process. About 10,000 resumés landed in the first few hours, says Vansen. A routine of military proportions was created to conduct the interviews, with VANOC transforming a chunk of the PNE into a processing centre. Late last year and into the spring, about 27,000 volunteers were put through the three-to-five-hour orientation and interviewing program in batches of about two dozen, watching heartwarming introductory videos before being sent off to their interviewers.
Vansen has a team of 60 at VANOC to manage this crowd of volunteers. It’s a job that has so far mainly consisted of reading quite a lot of resumés and feeding a dauntingly complex scheduling database. (“It’s hundreds of thousands of lines,” Vansen says with a grin. “It’s quite a bit of fun.”) Volunteers started receiving their job offers this summer, and the departments they will be working with began training them this fall.
About 750 volunteers will be starting before the Games to help with administration, the training of other volunteers and running pre-Games events. Another 5,000 will then help test all the venue operations before the events begin. About half the total volunteers working during Games time will be working in front-line customer-service jobs, while the rest perform a range of behind-the-scenes tasks, from serving as assistants to Olympics delegates to resetting the gates and flags between ski runs to guiding athletes through their drug-testing duties.
For those keen on contributing, Vansen says, it’s still not too late to apply. “We’re still looking for some key specific roles.”
Atos has been the official worldwide IT partner for the Olympics for eight years. Since 2006 Alvarsson has called Vancouver home and has led the Atos team working alongside VANOC staff to build the information systems needed to run the Games, everything from the corporate intranet to the distribution system that sends results to hundreds of media outlets 0.3 seconds after anyone crosses a finish line. He got his first chance to work with the Olympics in 1999, when his company offered him a position at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. After that job, it was Athens, then Turin, then Beijing, and now Vancouver. Alvarsson downplays the difficulties of switching countries every couple of years, although he says the moving gets easier over time. “I think it attracts people who are pretty secure in their own existence,” he explains.
The international workforce is just one element that makes VANOC a unique place to work. This is, after all, an organization that began with 50 people in 2005 and will employ somewhere around 50,000 by the opening ceremony in February 2010, including several thousand contractors – truck drivers, electricians, caterers, etc. – 25,000 volunteer workers and roughly 7,000 volunteer performers. Of VANOC’s current complement of 1,100 full-time staff members – which is expected to triple come February – about a quarter are Games Gypsies, according to Donna Wilson, VANOC’s vice-president of human resources. These Gypsies are recruited from a variety of major sporting events, including past Olympics and world championships from across North America and Europe.
Of course, what goes up must come down. After the closing ceremonies, VANOC will shrink to a staff of 50, who will divest the committee’s assets and oversee the transition of the venues. (The organization will ultimately be dissolved.) VANOC has already begun helping its staff move on with their careers, setting up a program to introduce them to prospective employers. But people who have been so immersed in such a demanding project also face emotional challenges, Wilson says, which is why VANOC is offering workshops and counselling services. She recalls advice she received from the CEO of the Lillehammer Games in her first months on the job: “He took me aside and said, ‘You’re responsible for people here. I want you to understand that you have to pay attention to the potential for depression and a real sense of loss at the end.’ ”