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| Corporate Cultures |
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| Cultural Twig-bending
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Think of how many ways your company has to involve a new
employee in your corporate culture before he or she actually
starts to work. What’s your guess? Six? A dozen?
Two dozen?
It’s likely the number you guessed is under twenty.
It’s equally likely that your company is missing
some or all of these opportunities to get new hires off
to the right start in your culture. Though most casino
operations now have at least some activities aimed at
cultural development, relatively few reap the benefit
of the most productive culture-building opportunities
– one that is fleeting in time but lasting in impact.
The actual number varies greatly from company to company,
but a typical casino operation has literally hundreds
of “touch” points in the process of acquiring
new employees. Each of these connections is a priceless
opportunity. Each is a chance to begin planting the seed
of your vision, communicating your goals and aspirations,
infusing the prospective employee with the behavior you
desire for your culture. If you capitalize on all of them,
a new employee will come into your organizational firmly
pointed in the right direction from Day One. This is most
especially important in the case of brand new casino openings.
There isn’t space here to list all of these touch
points, and it would be boring reading even if there was
space. However, there’s nothing boring about the
positive impact you can achieve if you use them to your
advantage. To tickle your imagination, let’s explore
some of the possibilities and how can you make them work
for your cultural development.
Job fairs can be more than just a platform to tell prospective
employees about your benefits package. Build into them
a theme that conveys what kind of company you run. Include
presentations that give jobseekers a sense of the personality
of your company as well as the hard facts. Make certain
that the tone and language of presentations, along with
the decor and other amenities are strategically positioned
to deliver a clear message of what kind of person is likely
to do well in your company. This applies to other events,
too, like community meetings and speeches by company officials.
Do you have a jobs hotline? What kind of impression does
it convey to callers? Plan and craft telephone contacts
with employee prospects as carefully as you would those
with an investor. After all, you’re asking them
to invest a major portion of their waking lives to your
enterprise.
Their experience on the phone with your company speaks
huge volumes to them about what your company is like.
Do they talk to a human or a machine? Are the first words
they hear respectful and reassuring? Do they get put on
hold? How long? What do they hear while they wait?
The environment a jobseeker encounters along the route
to becoming a new hire establishes a first impression.
Is the room where they fill out an application shabby,
noisy, cramped? Or is it spacious, businesslike, pleasant?
Use the decor at your recruiting center, job fairs, interview
rooms, and skills and drug testing sites to frame a positive
culture message. Decorate the walls with posters that
communicate the theme of your vision. Include take-me
displays of brochures and handouts that talk about your
vision and your culture. Pay attention to colors, cleanliness,
noise levels, and especially the behavior of your interviewers
and hosts.
The media you use to communicate job opportunities and
requirements should reflect the culture of your organization
as well as the factual necessities. Your application forms,
website, signage, recruiting brochures and videos, advertising
– in fact, everywhere you speak to the public –
should reinforce your cultural stance and expectations.
This serves a dual role of pre-conditioning new employees
and influencing those whose outlook may not be compatible
to self-select out of the hiring process.
Once you’ve hired an employee, there are many, many
more touch points to reinforce your cultural communication.
The notification of hiring is an important milestone.
It should send a positive message. The employee orientation
and all the new hire materials like handbooks should confirm
the employee’s belief that he or she is one of the
luckiest people in town to have this job. The hard realities
of working in a casino – any casino – will
soon enough knock some of the shine of their spirit; but
the brighter it is to start with, the better the spirit
will stand up to reality.
The hiring process is your once-in-a-relationship opportunity
to bend the twig the way you want the tree to grow. It’s
far easier to set it straight from the root instead of
trying to unbend it later.
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