Listen to your employees
Along with opening multiple avenues for management to communicate with employees, Bembenek also wanted to establish different platforms for employees to reach various levels of management with feedback. Without feedback channels and employees who feel enabled to use them, you won’t get an accurate read on how your cultural shift is taking root. You also won’t be able to open yourself to ideas and suggestions from your team.
“Some people are comfortable speaking directly with their supervisors,” Bembenek says. “Those are the people who are very open with their ideas and thoughts. Other people aren’t so open and want to offer feedback on an anonymous basis. We have the typical suggestion boxes and open-door policy for all levels of management, and we always open the floor to questions at every meeting. But sometimes people are still inhibited.”
To overcome shyness, apprehension and any other potential roadblock to employee feedback, Bembenek and his management team took an added step, turning feedback into a contest of sorts.
“If anyone suggests anything that we end up implementing in the company, we give that team member $50,” he says. “We’ve had suggestions of all kinds, from serving a certain type of food in our staff dining room to suggestions that have changed policies within the company.”
The leaders of Pala make feedback a money-earning proposition for employees because some of the most candid feedback and best ideas can come from the lowest rungs of an organization’s rank and file.
“Those are the people who interact with hundreds of our guests each day,” Bembenek says. “On the ground level, those are the people in a company who are going to be the most in tune with customers, as opposed to most of the executives, who don’t have the opportunity to rub elbows with customers as frequently.”
Listening to your employees is, by extension, listening to your customers. You can’t serve customers well without first engaging and empowering the employees who directly serve your customers. It’s the entire basis of Pala’s new culture, and it’s something that Bembenek tries to personally reinforce whenever his schedule allows.
Bembenek and his leadership team rely a great deal on cascading communication and the relationship between employees and their supervisors. But even though he is a CEO with the accompanying workload, Bembenek still sees value in blocking off time to informally interact with people at all levels of his organization.
The “informal” part is important.
“The informal interaction that you can initiate with employees is where you’re going to get some of your best information,” he says. “If you talk to a team member in a more formal capacity, as something is going on related to work, their response can sometimes be very restricted to the immediacy of the situation. But if you can engage someone in general conversation at a more relaxed point in time, you start to get a better picture of who they are, and they start to open up about some of the things they’ve heard from guests. That type of interaction can generate some of the best dialogue and information.”
With everything else on your extremely full plate, the only way you can ensure that you have time to simply get out and talk with your people is to make it happen. You have to clear time on your calendar just like you would for a meeting or any other appointment.
“You actually go into your calendar and make the time,” Bembenek says. “I insisted on that several years ago with my management team. I know how a day can fill up quickly, yet we always find time to make it to the meetings on our calendar. That’s how it kind of tripped in my mind that you have to treat your interaction time with employees like it’s a meeting on your calendar.”
Bembenek’s employee-centric approach to business has yielded results, despite the sluggish economy. Though customers aren’t spending like they did several years ago, Pala is experiencing record visitation to the casino and resort, which has helped to offset the drop in spending per guest. The company has not had layoffs.
As Pala moves into its second decade of operation, Bembenek proceeds with the knowledge that his company will be swimming upstream against the economy for the foreseeable future, but it will be doing so with an empowered work force that has the support of management.
“There is simply no way you can achieve the goal of having the best service without having team members that feel appreciated,” he says. “That’s it in a nutshell. At the end of the day, it’s all about that interaction between employees and customers.”
How to reach: Pala Casino Spa & Resort, (877) 946-7252 or www.palacasino.com
