Harrah’s Casino Case Analysis

Harrah’s Casino Case Analysis

Marilyn Winn has been appointed HR director for Harrah’s Casinos. Under her leadership, Harrah’s casinos employees have become motivated about customer service and she had decreased the turnover rate. Winn’s central force behind motivating employees was the implementation of an incentive pay plan to reward employees for improvements in customer service. When first introduced, the incentive pay plan was a great success. However, as time passed, employees became tired of working hard and not reaping the benefits of the incentive plan. Winn is now faced with the conflict of recommending to the COO a way to motivate employees either with the incentive plan or through a newly designed program.

Under CEO, Bill Harrah, employees of Harrah’s casino demonstrated a sense of pride and ownership and considered themselves to be working for a casino that modeled what all casinos should be like. Strengths of Harrah’s leadership to the casino are he helped the company in recruiting and retaining staff and maintained employee loyalty. Harrah helped with negotiations with regulators and public officials which was a good look for the company in the public eye. Difficulties under Harrah’s leadership are employees felt entitled to things based on tenure and loyalty, employees dwelled on the history of the company which prevented the company from progressing. The fact that Harrah was detail-oriented could also be a disadvantage. Harrah would be focused on making company numbers and not customer satisfaction.

Harrah’s new operating system consisted of not becoming a product-based company and continuing to be a market-based company. Harrah’s also created the Total Rewards program to gather information and understand customer preferences so they could tailor the most appropriate marketing strategies and monitor customer loyalty. This new operating system distinguished Harrah’s from other casinos by its desire to not build new attractions to the casino to attract new customers. Instead, Harrah’s wanted to maintain its clientele based on customer satisfaction. With the new operating system, Harrah’s hoped to gain a larger share of customers’ gaming budgets for existing properties and focusing on increasing same-store revenues. The new operating strategy implied that management personnel across the organization would have to focus on customer service and decreasing turnover, whereas in the past the management personnel were mostly concerned about executive compensations.

Harrah’s gain sharing program was different from a profit sharing program in that the profit sharing program was the