Crown Perth
Crown Perth welcomes more than seven million visitors a year (on average, 19,000 people a day), and our staff play a vital role in the achievement of the company’s vision to create a world-class entertainment precinct.
As WA’s largest single-site private employer, Crown Perth provides dynamic and diverse career opportunities for its 5,600 plus workforce.
Situation
Crown Perth is committed to its Indigenous Employment program. The group wanted to be recognised as a preferred employer for the Indigenous community in Perth and create positive career pathways for their Indigenous staff.
Solution
Crown Perth engaged Leading Teams to establish, develop and facilitate their mentoring program, providing them with skills to be leaders to other Indigenous staff so retention could be improved by identifying and discussing career development opportunities.
Result
The Crown Perth mentoring program has developed 12 Indigenous staff members as mentors during the 12 months of the program, retention has improved and Indigenous employees have a clearer understanding of their career pathway within the organisation.
Situation
Crown Perth’s Indigenous employment program, overseen by Sharon Ninyette, Senior Advisor of Indigenous Employment, aims to increase retention of Indigenous staff by providing pathways for career development; as well as attracting Indigenous staff from outside the business to apply for positions. With Sharon Ninyette the only mentor available to provide support, and with several Indigenous staff members working night shifts, there was a need to cultivate other mentors who would be available to provide mentoring around the clock.
Sharon set up a mentoring program to get the best leaders from Crown’s Indigenous staff and provided them with a framework to become role models to new employees as well as existing staff, and act as meditators during times of conflict. The role of the mentors was to provide support, guidance and understanding of issues, offer advice and possible solutions to assist staff to establish a pathway for their career at Crown Perth and develop a greater connection with their workplace.
Solution
Sharon chose employees who wereliving the behaviours and values consistent with those of the business to be a part of the mentoring program. Leading Teams was engaged to drive the mentoring process and help the group build the foundation for a high performing team with a clearly defined purpose – to create a supportive environment that enables other Indigenous staff to foster a successful career pathway at Crown Perth.
As part of the mentoring process, Darren Harris from Leading Teams helped the group to establish their trademark and the agreed behaviours that represented how the mentors wanted Indigenous staff to be perceived. The group uncovered the behaviours associated with Indigenous staff and discussed which were desirable and what could be done to change the ones that they no longer wanted to be associated with.
The group worked through the program to identify the trademark of Indigenous staff at Crown Perth and the behaviours that they wanted to see in the workplace.
The team also worked on building relationships, understanding the role of mentors in the organisation and ways of integrating the behaviours and trademark into their daily working lives.
Result
The mentoring program at Crown Perth started with five mentors and over the initial 12 month period a total of 12 mentors have benefitted from the program, with ambitions to have 20 mentors trained by the end of 2014.
The mentoring program has progressed from discussing behaviours that are accepted in the workplace to strategies and actions required to implement the behaviours. The trademark and behaviours have been closely integrated into the day to day performance of staff and reviews are now conducted against these behaviours on a regular basis. Recruitment also takes the agreed behaviours into consideration and staff have been able to track their progress in the business against the values and behaviours set out in the trademark.
Sharon Ninyette said, “Leading Teams has made the mentoring program successful by providing a framework for success, giving mentors skills to develop into leaders of the organisation and helping them improve others working lives by living out the values. The program has been crucial in building relationships with staff and helping new Indigenous employees transition into the workplace.”
At the beginning of the program, many of the mentors were shy and reluctant to voice their opinions. As the mentoring program progressed, these employees gained confidence and developed the skills associated with high performance.
Three of the staff have been nominated for employee of the year awards which was impressive, and is testament that the program is achieving what we set out for it to achieve, which was for employees to grow from their starting positions in the business and advance in their work to gain promotions,” Ninyette added
The program’s success has been in developing strong professional relationships at Crown Perth and clearly understanding the agreed behaviours so that employees were able to have honest conversations. Creating a framework for behaviour and performance has been very useful in guiding staff at Crown Perth. Following the success of the program in Perth, Crown is looking at establishing a mentoring program at Crown Melbourne.
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