A fair shake
Casino Windsor's new human resources system is paying double dividends. There's trust in the employee review system and reduced administrative work.
By Erik Heinrich
It's 9 a.m. and a bleary-eyed, 40ish guy stooped over a craps table suddenly jumps into the air and pumps his fist as if at an AC/DC concert. "Yeah," he yells, and slaps his buddy's back. Lady Luck is finally on his side. Maybe he's starting the day off right. But his crumpled look suggests he's finishing up the night and ready for bed.
The relentless ringing and clanging of slots in the background is slightly mind-numbing. It is the one constant in this 100,000 sq. ft. gaming room, and brings to mind an army of electronic cicadas. Outside the Chatham St. entrance, the motor coaches are already piling up, and disgorging a crush of humanity. Some come from nearby Detroit, whose skyline looms over the opposite shore of the river that marks this stretch of the Canada/U.S. border. Others have come from as far away as Ohio and Indiana.
But wherever they've come from, they are all here for the same thing. The thrill and excitement of gambling at what is probably North America's biggest gaming destination outside Las Vegas and Atlantic City: Casino Windsor.
With about 5,400 employees, thousands of slots, at least a hundred tables from Black Jack to baccarat, a 400-room luxury hotel, four restaurants and live shows every night, this is big business. Indeed annual revenue at Casino Windsor Ltd. — owned by the Government of Ontario and managed by a private consortium jointly owned by Caesars World and Hilton Hotels Corp. — was $838.5 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2000.
When you're running a big hotel and casino, the product is only as good as the people who deliver it. And in 1999 Casino Windsor found itself in the middle of a crisis. The company's 1,000 non-unionized employees — mainly people in key managerial, supervisory, administrative and IT functions — had lost confidence in how their performance was being evaluated. This resulted in a deterioration in morale that began to spread throughout the casino's rank and file like the flu.
"We were using a pencil-and-paper system that was very subjective," says Richard Mignault, vice-president of HR and MIS at Casino Windsor. "And employees were constantly complaining about their reviews."
Something had to be done fast, and so after considering his options Mignault — a native of Montreal who has worked in senior management for major hotel chains in London, New York, Berlin and Miami — settled on an HR solution from a small Calgary-based company, JPS Management Consulting Ltd. The price tag, which varies from company to company depending on the number of employees, was about $340,000.
Was it the right decision? The short answer is yes. "We went from a VW Beetle to a Cadillac Deville when we switched to enCompassing Visions," says Ferro Pugliese, director of human resource development at Casino Windsor. "It was a huge leap." He adds the enCompassing Visions system has re-established trust in the review process, and saved hundreds of hours of administrative time.
But the enCompassing Visions, required some fine-tuning in its first 12 months of operation. And it will be another year before the system is functioning to Casino Windsor's full satisfaction.
Why did Mignault select enCompassing Visions, one of some ten HR systems on the market? "They offered a fully integrated solution that links performance management to hiring practices, compensation and training," says Mignault, a snazzy dresser with a predilection for suspenders and expensive silk ties.
The enCompassing Visions system allows Casino Windsor to marry HR best practices with Web technology (in this case the system resides on a corporate intranet) to create a solution that gives management the power to take the pulse of its labour force. And perhaps most importantly, to root out HR weaknesses and fix them.
The guts of the system is a detailed questionnaire that rates employees on 38 core competencies ranging from relationship building and team playing, to goal setting and organizational awareness. Each competency is evaluated by a person's boss, or bosses, using a five-point scale ranging from high to no ability.
At the end of the exercise the enCompassing Visions system produces a score for each employee, which allows management to stack up performance from best to worst in each job category. In a split second, for example, Mignault can know who his best table-games supervisor is. But is putting people under a microscope in this fashion an example of Big-Brother harassment or enlightened management?
"The enCompassing Visions system treats people fairly because it eliminates human influence," says Doug Chapman, president and founder of JPS Management Consulting. "Whether or not you get along with your boss doesn't matter. If you're doing your job well, people in the organization will know."
A number of high-profile companies, including Sony Canada Ltd., Scott's Restaurants Inc. and Allstate Insurance, have installed enCompassing Visions. And Chapman insists his product is a godsend for what he calls popofa (piss-off, pass-over, forgotten about) employees.
Casino Windsor is installing the enCompassing Visions system in two stages. The first — employee evaluation — had to be up and running in two months for the January to March 2000 review period. It was a race to the finish line, but Casino Windsor, with the help of ENCOMPASSING VISIONS Management Consulting, got the job done. How did the casino's first computerized review go? The results were mixed.
"I didn't think my evaluation was accurate so I challenged the result," says Reto Schmid, the Swiss-born director of food and beverages at Casino Windsor. "It's not that I didn't like the score I received. I just didn't think it was a true reflection."
In Schmid's view, the questions were too generic, particularly for highly skilled personnel such as executive chefs. "No matter how you slice it the system is only as good as the people who use it," says Schmid, who personally evaluated 10 managers. By that Schmid means if a manager wants to tamper with a particular worker's evaluation, he is able to do so by going through the exercise a second time and changing his answers to get a different score. He says the system should be changed to eliminate this possibility, and that Casino Windsor should create a feedback loop that allows workers to challenge their evaluation if they are unhappy with it.
Says Mary-Lou Herdman, an employee in Casino Windsor's finance department, "I think a substantial number of the questions didn't apply to me." Indeed Herdman estimates nearly half of competencies included in the enCompassing Visions evaluation were not relevant to her job. This resulted in a low overall score because her boss decided not to rate her in these areas.
Still, both Schmid and Herdman agree the enCompassing Visions system is miles better than its predecessor. Says David Hunter, a senior HR and IT consultant with Virtual Strategies Inc. of Toronto, "You can't change an organization just by dropping a technology at the door. But at the same time you need a system that provides you with a standardized framework for rating people's performance."
Pugliese says feedback was solicited after the first enCompassing Visions review, and modifications have been made. For example the latest version allows users to omit competencies they think are irrelevant to a particular job without compromising the overall score.
The second, and more complicated stage of the enCompassing Visions implementation, is currently under way. It requires Casino Windsor to determine the relative value of some 350 job classifications, and rebalance its entire salary structure to reflect those values.
It also involves linking data from performance evaluations to salaries, incentives and employee-development programs. At present Casino Windsor is using Infinium, an IT system widely used in the U.S. gaming business, for its payroll and training administration. But the plan is to import data from the enCompassing Visions system into Infinium so less biased decisions can be made about salary increases.
Since adopting the enCompassing Visions system, Casino Windsor has invested several million dollars developing an employee-training centre next to the casino at 250 Windsor Ave. The plan is to use this facility to eradicate some of the weaknesses identified by the enCompassing Visions system, particularly in soft areas such as interpersonal and team-building skills.
And by January 2001 the casino will only accept electronic CVs. This will save an enormous amount of time when you consider the casino now receives about 25,000 paper CVs each year.
Will a combination of e-CVs and automated job evaluations mean job cuts in the casino's 43-person strong HR department? Mignault insists it does not, adding the changes will give his staff the opportunity to do intelligent, rather than busy work. Says Mignault: "HR should be an act of motivation, not administration."