In the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, he alludes to the fact that businesses become and remain great by getting the right people on the bus; the wrong people off the bus; and the right people in the right seats. However, keeping a handle on employees at a casino becomes difficult because operational hours are not the same as traditional business. Consequently it has become a feedback-deprived place and casinos need to be especially aware of this. It’s easy to miss that employee that goes the extra mile, yet they are the ones that boost productivity, profits, and competitive advantage at no extra cost. A casino that doesn’t recognize and reward engagement and high performance will not have engaged high performers for long. Keeping people in place who aren’t performing is not good for the casino and those who need to improve should be identified, coached, and motivated.
In 2012, HRExaminer wrote that “traditional performance management software based on annual and quarterly reviews, miss the whole rhythm of the business.” They propose systems that allow instantaneous and continuous evaluation as being far more beneficial to businesses. Move on to 2013 and add the continued rise of a fascinating trend called crowdsourcing: the marriage of data from multiple sources e.g. Amazon’s “star rankings”. Today people are making decisions based on feedback from many different people. These crowdsourced conclusions are supplementing “expert” opinions.
Performance assessments need to follow this trend and be based on a continuous stream of information from multiple sources in order to provide a more accurate assessment. Single managers give subjective performance assessments. The missing players in the traditional performance review process are everyone else who comes in contact with the employee.
George Bernard Shaw rightly said that, “Progress is impossible without change”. Casinos that invest time into changing the way they assess performance will keep and attract the high performers and gain a huge competitive advantage.
