A sure bet: Atlantic City's newest casino uses software to recruit and empower employees and to improve customer satisfaction

HR Magazine, August, 2004 by Bill Roberts

The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, the newest casino in Atlantic City, N.J., was less than a year old when management decided to renovate the front desk area. Why? Because the bellhops told them to.

The luggage storage area was quite a distance from the front desk, causing delays in fetching bags for departing customers. Some suitcases were damaged because the bellhops had to schlep them around too many corners. Several customers lodged complaints, which eventually found their way to management. But the problem was first identified via the employee portal on the corporate network, where HR routinely conducts online surveys of workers (called associates), including a 45-day checkup for new hires.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Associate satisfaction is a leading indicator of customer satisfaction. We've been able to correlate that," says Cassie Fireman, vice president of talent, who is responsible for HR and customer satisfaction at Borgata.

In addition to having an HR executive who is responsible for customer satisfaction--a rare combination--Borgata appears to have accomplished something else so rare that most companies only pay it lip service: With the help of technology, Borgata executives have connected worker performance to the bottom line. And they've done it with a polyglot workforce that is not highly educated and has scant computer experience.

"At the Borgata, guest satisfaction equals workforce performance equals corporate performance," says Jason Averbook, director of global product marketing for PeopleSoft Corp. of Pleasanton, Calif., which supplied Borgata's HR management system (HRMS) and portal software. "There are 16 other casinos in Atlantic City, so players have a lot of options. The success of these casinos is based on guest satisfaction: Do they keep coming back? Labor is the key. Borgata understands the value of the workforce."

Given the way Borgata ties employee satisfaction to corporate performance, Averbook thinks Fireman and her 23-person HR team may have achieved something that is only a dream for most HR professionals: job security. "This is how HR doesn't get outsourced," he says. "She is creating value for every shareholder every day."

Online Recruiting

The technology would have been useless without a new mindset. In an industry not noted for empowering workers, Borgata executives decided worker empowerment would be an essential ingredient to the successful launch and operation of their casino, a joint venture between Boyd Gaming Corp. and MGM Mirage, both based in Las Vegas. They were determined to find ways to empower employees because they believed it would lead to worker satisfaction, which translates into corporate success, says Fireman.

When Fireman joined the team in 2001, she had numerous discussions with CEO Bob Bogner on the goals of the talent department, especially its role in improving employee satisfaction. HR at Borgata, she says, "is much more engaged in the business operation than most HR departments. We wanted to do some things from an empowerment perspective for the employee and the manager by putting tools in their hands and letting them function in an HR capacity."

The gaming industry also is not known for using technology, but Borgata executives deemed HR software to be an essential tool for achieving worker empowerment. In a town full of veteran casino workers with many job options, Borgata even used empowerment through technology to bolster the recruitment campaign, whose slogan is "Work someplace different."

When Fireman began to look at HR software, some segments of corporate America were beginning to adopt portals, manager self-service (MSS) and employee self-service (ESS). She gave passing thought to developing a system in-house, but decided on the HRMS from PeopleSoft because it offered the portal, ESS and MSS software Borgata would need. The company also adopted PeopleSoft's financial and payroll software.

Averbook says Borgata had a huge advantage over most adopters: It started from scratch, unencumbered by legacy software and old ways of doing things. "They took a holistic approach to human capital management from day one," he says. "Other organizations adopt bits and pieces and later try to glue things together."

The implementation, begun in the summer of 2002, was staged in phases to bring up applications as they were needed. After installing the HRMS database, Borgata turned on online recruiting applications and MSS for hiring. These tools were used when 5,000 employees were hired in the five months leading up to Borgata's opening in July 2003. By January 2003, Fireman had hired 50 managers--including gaming supervisors, restaurant managers and housekeeping supervisors--trained them on the software and then set them to the task of hiring the other employees.

A Tale of Two Portals

The initial implementation included two portals. A portal is a gateway to the Internet that offers content, links and services to guide the users to information they need. One Borgata portal was designed to help the small management team recruit employees, and the other to inform the public about Borgata and its job offerings.