Serve your employees
From his experience in the hospitality industry, Bembenek says businesses generally have one of two approaches to service — customer-centric or employee-centric.
Customer-centric companies focus directly on the customer experience, regardless of who is delivering that experience. Employee-centric companies are primarily concerned with enabling and supporting the people who interact with the customers each business day — the workers who put a human face on the company for all customers.
“Both of those approaches can be effective, but what we believe is that the most effective approach is to be employee-centric,” Bembenek says. “That means you treat team members the way you’d like them to treat your guests. If you do that, you have a much better opportunity to succeed. That’s why we developed a philosophy to make sure our team members are supported, empowered and appreciated. We want them to have a high sense of security in the company they work for. That makes all the other efforts related to our guest experience easier.”
To roll out an employee-focused culture, Bembenek had to send his communication strategy to the weight room. It needed more strength, more size and more power.
Above all else, it needed more layers.
“In order for a culture to change, it needs to be embraced by all levels of the company,” he says. “At each level, you want to take the time to ensure that there is a consistent message and everyone is pointed in the right direction.”
Bembenek and his leadership team began working on messages aimed at reaching out to employees at all levels of the organization, creating a dialogue that would educate employees on Pala’s new direction, stimulate feedback and empower employees to take initiative on enhancing customer service.
Bembenek first worked with his direct reports on the senior leadership team. Once everyone in upper management was aligned, the new cultural principles were cascaded to middle management, then to the floor supervisor level. Once every manager in the company had achieved alignment, then Bembenek rolled the message out to the employees working the front desk, restaurants, casino floor and any place where customers spend their money.
“Each step took more and more time, as we made sure that we had buy-in from larger and larger groups,” he says. “Only after all that was completed did we roll the message out to our team members.”
Bembenek wanted to have each management layer of Pala engaged successively because of the organization’s size and large number of customer interface areas. The most effective way for any large organization to communicate is from supervisor to subordinate.
“This isn’t something that can be accomplished by one person with one singular message,” he says. “It has to be reinforced and encouraged through all layers of an organization.”
But that doesn’t mean upper management stays detached from everyone outside of the executive office wing. Though Bembenek can’t personally reinforce Pala’s culture to every employee all the time, he and his upper management team still take the opportunity to make an impression on employees.
He has small group meetings like many business leaders have. They are effective in stimulating dialogue and keeping employees informed. But in true casino fashion, Bembenek and his management team like to put a little jolt of electricity into larger meetings, to keep things interesting for employees.
“We created a new position in the company, and the responsibility of that person is to be creative and come up with new ways to engage team members,” Bembenek says. “We develop meetings that try to be both informative and entertaining. We’ll show YouTube videos or some kind of video that conveys, in a comedic way, a service issue that we feel is important to the company.
“We just try to mix it up from group size to format to creativity levels, so that a team member can come to six different meetings over the course of a year and each one will feel different. We don’t want to be in a position where people are walking into a meeting with a preconceived notion of what they will experience. You need to inject some enthusiasm into the way you communicate, because when you’re doing the same job for seven or eight years, doing the same tasks repetitiously, the job kind of becomes mundane. That’s why one of the things we try to accomplish with our communication is to keep our team members excited about the environment they’re working in.”
