BURN AND TURN. Dealers Please!

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TT what he means is dealers will be trying to fix their own mistakes in the box without calling the floor for fear of penalty for the mistake, instead of the floor making the correction and just moving on, now you have dealers fixing their own mistakes to avoid a penalty.

Not good.

[*TT*]

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Youre also assuming there's a budget allowed for incentives like this.

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I can argue this easily with upper casino management, I will increase the take by x%. lets set aside Y% of the increase for the performance incentive. This is a found opportunity, its the cost of increasing productivity. This concept comes from the manufacturing floors of factories, and is a proven metric that encourages employees and management to reach the management revenue goals.

pretty convincing, no? Say the projected increase is an overall 1.5 hands/hour at a $3 drop. (fuzzy math coming - ). In a 10 table room thats $45/hour. Lets assume the per-table rev calc is for a 12 hour period (again, fuzzy math but it helps explain the concept simply). Thats $540/day * 350 (we will remove 12 days to show down time), $189k/year projected increase in GROSS revenue through the incentive program. Now lets set asside 25% as the cost of the program - the pool is a theoretical $47,250.

To make the calc more accurate you could make the incentive so the pool becomes 25% of the total over the prior years gross take with some metrics for statistical variance such as holidays, conventions, players/hour, tables in use - all used to provide a measure that doesn't allow the incentive pool to bloat with disclose to the staff how the calc is being made (this is important - communication with staff is key so they don't feel cheated).

Another positive is that encourages staff to remain. The award could happen in January but payment is made in April or something like that so you dont see a mass exodus after the holidays. Or this pool could be developed on a monthly basis.

Keep in mind this is just one idea... there are many ways to increase productivity, accountability, and accuracy. A nice side effect will be that the card room might become the most in-demand job for dealers in your market, which in turn will allow you to replace non-performing employees that are holding back the team from making their goals.

[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.

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How is providing a reward a penalty? Its an incentive for good performance, not a penalty.

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2) A deduction from their share of the merit pool for each dealing infraction made.

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[*TT*]

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TT what he means is dealers will be trying to fix their own mistakes in the box without calling the floor for fear of penalty for the mistake, instead of the floor making the correction and just moving on, now you have dealers fixing their own mistakes to avoid a penalty.

Not good.

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Part of the process is a sliding penalty scale. If the dealer is caught fixing his or her mistake the penalty becomes huge compared to the penalty of a dealing error. Nobody wants the big penalty because it would remove the shift's earned incentive, make it cost prohibitive and the problem will disappear.

[*TT*]

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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.

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How is providing a reward a penalty? Its an incentive for good performance, not a penalty.

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2) A deduction from their share of the merit pool for each dealing infraction made.

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Answer: Allow the employee to opt-out of the merit pool. Its not a penalty if its found money they wouldn't have had in the first place. if the pool was created by lowering staff wages then your argument would be valid, this is a found opportunity for all dealers, its "magic money". The reward is tempered by mistakes, some mistakes cost more than others.

Also keep in mind nobody would want to get fired if it jeopardizes their end of year bonus.

[pokerdoug1973]

I have also considered an incentive program of sorts, such as shift changes. Allowing the dealers that are mistake free better shifts. A few years ago I managed a poker room that was brand new. This was before poker gained its popularity and I would have sit down sessions with dealers that were making mistakes. In turn, the problem dealers were soon afraid to call the floor when a simple error was made and I found that some were attempting to correct them on their own. Personally I have no tolerance for self correcting dealers and had to terminate on this basis alone.

Recently I have thought of averaging my dealers mistakes on a per shift basis and allowing something like one burn and turn per 10 or 20 shifts. Anything over that would have to be a warning after the first evaluation period, and termination if the problem persists. Then again the dealers that keep a very low average should be given first choice of shifts and maybe something such as some reward of some kind. I am also a veteran poker player, and find few things more irritating when I am playing than a dealer that makes mistakes, especially one that can cost the rightful winner an entire pot.

[psandman]

I opened a room in which managment told the dealers that after 90 days they would be ranked on skill level and choice of shifts distributed on that basis.

I also believe that the extra board dealers were led to believe that such ranking would give them a chance to get a full-time shift (I suspect management will claim they never said that, it was clearly implied == I was one of the extra board dealers) While it sounds like a good idea there is a problem .. . your management has to be honest and dedicated to these evaluations.

When the 90 day point came we had a meeting and we were told that all the dealers rankings were so close that they didn't mean anything. Now there were quite a few breakins, a couple experienced dealers, one or two with a ton of experience.here is no way that those rankings were legitametly all to close to matter. We had good dealers bad dealers and in between.

We were asked to sign our evaluations and return them. . . Problem . . No body had written up an evaulation of me. So one of the shift managers went and wrote one up. It was all positive not one negative. == That was the last day I ever worked at that poker room.

So you can see why I'm some what skeptical of these sort of systems, not in theory but in practice.

[psandman]

I'm not saying therit pay is a penalty simply saying that dealers will be trying to hide their mistakes. Hey am always happy to call the floor when I screw up. But a dealer knowing that calling the floor may cost them money may be hesitant.

If merit pay is introduced I don't think it should be optional.

[jjshabado]

Don't dealers already get merit pay, ie. tips?

Everybody talks about how dealers at Foxwoods suck because the tips are pooled and there is no incentive to be better. Isn't the corollary of that, that individual tips cause dealers to try harder and work smarter thus improving their abilities.

Is there any evidence that some additional incentive would actually be effective?

This is actually why I hate the standard tip for all dealers policy. As players we're removing the main tool we have for improving our dealers.

[PeteN]

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What do you consider to be too often? Once per week? Once per month? Once or twice per year?

Other than termination, what can I do?

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Anytime I find myself asking these questions, and I've learned the hard way, I need to get rid of somebody.

Being mathematical, I'd probably chart out the dealers and see where the top 10%, 20%, 50%, 80%, 90% fall. I'm thinking once a night is too much, bye.

As for incentives, I'd use the tip pool and the top x% would split say 20% of it. I'm not a dealer. But I would think this is a disaster when it happens, and least for big pots.

Actually, now that I think about it. I'd probably set a standard. Dealers doing his less than x times a month for example get to split the pot. And I'd like to reward the zeros more, maybe thats the standard. And forget the top x%.

Just my thoughts, hate these problems.