Human resource chief links employee satisfaction, customer service
Mohegan — Happy employees make for happy customers.
That’s certainly true in the hospitality industry, particularly casinos, which rely on the quality of the service they provide to separate themselves from their competitors.
All casinos have slot machines and roulette wheels. But they don’t all have a Kawel LauBach.
LauBach, senior vice president and chief human resource officer for the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, has been credited with honing the workforce culture that has helped the authority’s properties — Mohegan Sun, Mohegan Sun Pocono in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City — thrive. HRO Today, a publication that covers the human resources field, last month named LauBach its 2015 CHRO of the Year among for-profit corporations.
The recognition came on the heals of Forbes magazine naming Mohegan Sun one of “America’s Best Employers.”
LauBach, 45, who lives in East Lyme with his wife Leslie and their three children, oversees both guest services and human resources for MTGA, a combination that’s at the heart of the authority's “progressive” approach to employee relations.
“He has an appreciation of how the culture of an organization correlates with that organization’s ability to deliver a great guest experience,” Bobby Soper, the MTGA president, said of LauBach, with whom he worked at Mohegan Sun Pocono before he and LauBach moved to Connecticut.
LauBach began his career in operations with United Parcel Service in Louisville, Ky., and then worked for Southwest Airlines in Dallas. While there, he got a call from a recruiter for Harrah’s (now Caesars Entertainment), which LauBach said “had some culture problems they thought someone from Southwest Airlines could fix.”
“I learned very quickly it’s hard to replicate cultures,” he said. “Gaming can be pretty rigid. It’s known for creating distance between employees and management.”
But at Mohegan Sun, LauBach said, productivity is tied to employee engagement.
“You can’t tell someone, ‘If you don’t smile, you get fired,’” he said. “You have to give them a reason to smile. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s Utopia here, but we rely less on policies. We try to eliminate barriers. There’s no ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
LauBach said Soper embodies the approach, his door always open to anyone with a grievance. At Mohegan Sun, where more than 11 percent of the workforce has been with the casino since it opened in 1996, the employee retention rate exceeds 80 percent, far above the hospitality-industry average.
No union has succeeded in organizing MTGA employees.
“He’s been such a catalyst for the organization,” Maria Zangardi, the director of human resources at Mohegan Sun Pocono, said of LauBach.
Zangardi, who nominated LauBach for the HRO Today award, credits him with instilling a “philosophy of reciprocity” among employees, with managers seeking to build a rapport with workers and to motivate them through compassion.
LauBach’s strategy, she said, is to hire people who are “fun, energetic, kind, genuine,” train them to be engaged and interested in their work, and reward them for good performance.
LauBach said he looks for innate traits in a candidate.
“Like friendliness,” he said. “I don’t care if you haven't been a bartender for 20 years. We can teach you how to make a martini. But we can't teach you how to be friendly.”
Twitter: @bjhallenbeck
Comment threads are monitored for 48 hours after publication and then closed.
