BACKGROUND

Marcus Diaz is the director of training and development for two Native American casinos in Tucson, Arizona, Casino of the Sun and Casino Del Sol. His overall responsibility is to spearhead the training and development initiatives of over 1,300 staff members and to ensure that each employee receives the appropriate training. Marcus also acts as an internal consultant to help solve issues and make recommendations for overall improvement.

CHALLENGE

Marcus was attending the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) international conference and exhibition in Dallas when he came across the Turning Technologies booth. He had been shopping around for an audience response system and done a great deal of preliminary research. He knew that an audience response system would be a great tool for his training classes. At the conference, he began to explore Turning Technologies’ products with one of their knowledgeable account executives. Marcus’ forte is mixing training with technology to maximize efficiency. When he saw TurningPoint in action, he knew “hands down that TurningPoint’s unique features really outperformed the competition.”

SOLUTION

Marcus initially planned to use TurningPoint for staff responses during training classes, but has found many other applications for the response software. Instead, he uses TurningPoint in a variety of focus groups, asking interactive questions that yield a wealth of pertinent information. “It’s actually taken on a life of its own in some ways,” he said.

TurningPoint has helped the casinos make a quantum leap in data collection because they went from manual paper-based surveys that cost the company in one week the entire cost of the TurningPoint system itself. “This technology paid for itself within a month. With the paper surveys, we were using a database to calculate the data and entering each survey manually. With TurningPoint, this process is all done real time and the results are automatically exported, generating results within minutes.”

“Best of all, our CEO loves this technology. He is the biggest advocate for this; when I showed him he was so excited about using it that he actually wanted to hold employee meetings with random employees having me facilitate the data gathering. He wanted to bring them to lunch, ask how things are going and get a snapshot of the culture.”

In the internal focus groups, Marcus’ goal is to gather raw data from staff members to take a snapshot of the working environment to assist management in aligning corporate initiatives and objectives and make sure employees are actually performing necessary tasks.

“TurningPoint offers us a lot; it offers us a wide range of tools to capture valuable data. For example, I’ve been working with the marketing team to align management and staff members on objectives to make sure they are working well together.”

TurningPoint’s ability to add interactive polling questions into standard PowerPoint® presentations provides organizations with a powerful, easy-to-use data collection and assessment tool. With 100% PowerPoint integration and detailed reporting via Word and Excel the learning curve is minimal, maximizing the return on investment.

Marcus’ team held a focus group of eleven key staff members in the marketing department, surveyed them, and shared a very open conversation without management present. He asked the marketing staff to make recommendations as he facilitated the process. With the resulting data, Marcus’ team was able to develop a report on suggested improvements. Subsequently, they’ve been able to foster a yearly training plan.

“I would say that this has become a standard tool which we are going to use. It’s a standard tool—just like we use a pencil to write or use a computer to log on. We’re going to use this response technology to evaluate and take snapshots of where our people are. We use TurningPoint for evaluations, surveys, polls, and to just have fun,” said Marcus.

The employee feedback has been extremely positive. The employees that have gone through focus groups feel like it provides transparency, allowing them to see how their peers feel as well as discuss issues and possible solutions.

In training, Marcus uses TurningPoint to measure knowledge transference. After employees go through a training class, he brings them back three months later and uses TurningPoint to evaluate if the class met its objectives, to measure opinions about if the training was reinforced and supported, and to ask if employee behavior has changed as a result.

CONCLUSION

“Regardless of the industry or even mentality, this can be a crucial tool to help any organization gauge the perception of its employees. Without this type of technology, it’s difficult to understand their perception with transparency.”

Marcus found that TurningPoint allowed them to evaluate current training programs and make adjustments. “We thought as a training department we were doing a good job in the content that we were delivering. When we took some of our staff through certain programs that we had bought off on, we realized that they didn’t like them at all. We made immediate changes to the classes and the overall satisfaction results jumped about 60% overall!”

“This technology is going to be used in almost every approach that we have, new hire training programs, executive management programs, and focus groups. It’s been the perfect tool, from measuring ROI to gauging employee and management satisfaction to improving the guest experience.”

For more information about purchasing or renting Turning Technologies’ audience response systems for your organization, contact us at 866-746-3015.