Colin Drummond, CEO of Viridor, the recycling, renewable energy and waste management company went undercover to discover more about his business. Before the programme aired, we got a sneak peek at Colin’s Undercover Boss experience.

Undercover Boss is one of those rare programmes which highlights relationships between bosses, employees and organisational culture to a mass audience. It’s easy to get sucked in by the format, but always in the back of the mind, we’re asking: how are CEOs so little known in their own businesses that they can walk around without being recognised?

Some of the bosses featured so far this series have taken over fairly recently and have been purposely keeping a low profile in order to film the series. However, Colin Drummond, CEO of Viridor, the waste management company, has been CEO since he bought the company in 1993.

So how could he consider it? In 1993 the company was operating with 20 million turnover and running at 1 million profit: today it turns over 262 million and makes 73 million profit. One of the few areas in which there has been rapid growth, the renewable energy, recycling and waste management sectors have been highly lucrative for Viridor and the organisation has been growing so quickly it meant there were recent acquisitions in the company where Colin could consider going undercover – it wasn’t, as we discover, because he never leaves the board room. He explained: “Because we’re expanding very fast I was able to find areas which are new businesses for us. That was one of the big issue we had in terms of which sites I could go to."

However, the best laid plans (and best fake glasses, and well grown beard) can go wrong, as Colin discovered: “We did get spotted once but we had to swear them to secrecy. I was fairly heavily disguised so I was wearing quite a lot of stubble.”

He added: “There were a lot of areas it would have been logical to go to but the risk was too great. Last year we started a big new operation in Manchester, and we thought working up in that area the chances were that, with my disguise, I might not be recognised, but I did get recognised by one of the managers.”

Colin is understandably proud of the growth of his company, and he believes Viridor is ‘probably the most successful recycling, renewable energy and waste management company in the country’. So why would a CEO with so much faith in this company feel the need to go undercover?

“One of the reasons I was keen to do this exercise was that we are keen on empowering our employees,” said Colin.

“We certainly believe in trying to get the best from our people and letting decisions be made at the right level, but I was particularly interested to see – at the sharp end – what our employees are like,” he explained.

With a whole board of executives, it would have been easy for Colin to leave the undercover job to someone else, but he insisted. He said: “I personally thought, it’s undercover boss, the boss man has to do it. And if I’m getting my troops to do A, B and C, I’m certainly prepared to do the same as them. As a chief executive, I’m prepared to do the same things I am asking them to do. It was very important, I have to say, and matter of personal pride that I was prepared to do it.”

Colin’s cover story, although he backed it up with experience from his own life proved problematic, although not in the way you might expect. He expressed guilt over actually going undercover and essentially lying to his employees, saying: “I was worried that some of the guys I was dealing with would be upset as to why they’d been misled.”

However, he found they were surprisingly open to the idea come reveal time: “They were very enthusiastic, but I have to admit I was pretty worried in advance that some of the guys would be pretty upset.” Colin was also fortunate to have full support of the board in his findings and plan of action.

One of the most pleasing things Colin discovered was how his employees were coming up with their own ideas about how to encourage recycling and deliver better services. At one community recycling plant he found a fantastic system which had been put in place by the employees themselves. Another relief for Colin was the attitude taken to health and safety – some of the briefings he described as ‘frightening’ – and he maintains this is a sign of health and safety being taken seriously.

Undercover Boss is always about characters, and Colin it seems meets his fair share of these, including a cancer sufferer who refused to take sick leave, and an agency worker, sadly not featured in the programme, who helped Colin realise that if they find themselves relying on agency workers on a continual basis they should work with their employment agencies to contract them full time.

Colin said: “There were a number of excellent workers who really would have loved a full time job. Where we are clear that we’ve got a long term need for employees, where we are clear that we have got people who have shown that they want to enter the business, we will give them long term contracts.”

It wasn’t all good news however – one set of facilities for employees was described as ‘unacceptable’ by the CEO. Colin employed his natural HR instincts to deal with that situation, saying: “I think that you have to give people absolute respect. Show them respect and show you care and I believe you’ll have a good response back again. Some people were saying well, we’ve had this before, welfare facilities don’t get looked after, I say, we have to go the extra distance and that way the staff will look after it.”

Even if the programme is a fair interpretation of the actual experience (and Colin claims this is indeed the case), one criticism might be that it is too formulaic to be actually useful to a company. Colin refutes this, saying: “I thought it was incredibly valuable. I did think long and hard about it in advance. I’d say to others if they get the opportunity to do it, I certainly would encourage others to do it…it certainly has proved incredibly revealing.”

• You can see our blog on the episode here on HRzone.
  
• Look out next week for Undercover Boss coverage with Narin Ganesh of Crown Relocations here on HRzone.