[psandman]

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Other than termination, what can I do?

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IMHO this is a GREAT question. Its unfortunate that in most poker rooms the management are former dealers, not professional managers. Its great to see you ask a question to help improve the quality of your staff - congrats, so many managers are fearful of looking to outside help in their decision process.

I suggest budgeting in merit performance pay. Now there are many ways to impliment this concept, I will only provide one as an example.

Assuming you have systems in place to determine the house take per down and track which dealer is where on each down then a merit system could be constructed based where the employees get their share of the merit bonus pool (determined at the beginning of the fiscal year, this should be a fixed cost) based on two qualifications

1) Their share of the total percentage of the house take
2) A deduction from their share of the merit pool for each dealing infraction made.

The concept is simple, it encourages dealers to not only deal fast, but to also deal accurately. The challenge becomes management training, you must now conduct team meetings to discuss how dealing errors greatly reduce the take per down because an error takes more time to correct than dealing slower and more accurately would.

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The problem this presents is that when you penalize dealers for every mistake they will try to fix their own mistakes to avoid penalty. This ends up being much worse.

While merit pay is not a bad idea strict formulas are problematic.