Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Q&A: Michelle DiTondo

ditondo

Christopher DeVargas

Michelle DiTondo. senior vice president of human resources at MGM Resorts International. says “we have hundreds of positions open.”

Twenty years ago, Las Vegas native Michelle DiTondo couldn’t have envisioned landing the job she has today — heading human resources at Nevada’s largest private employer, MGM Resorts International.

“I happened into HR by mistake,” DiTondo said. “I grew up in Las Vegas, but didn’t work in the gaming industry until six or seven years ago.”

DiTondo went to college with plans to become a schoolteacher, but in 1992 she found schools weren’t hiring.

After graduating from Arizona State University and after interviewing in other fields, she landed her first job working in human resources for the federal government at Air Force bases in Georgia and Utah.

She later moved to the private sector, working in HR for banks and a consulting firm and completing an MBA at Brigham Young University. But, she missed her hometown and family. DiTondo returned to Las Vegas to become an HR executive at the Flamingo.

She joined MGM Resorts in 2006, serving as vice president of human resources at New York-New York and Mandalay Bay.

Along the way her performance caught the eye of MGM Resorts executives. In January Chief Operating Officer Corey Sanders named her the new senior vice president of human resources.

DiTondo attributes some of her success to the fact she knows the local workforce.

“Outside of my HR and educational background, I grew up in Las Vegas,” she said. “My parents were hourly employees. I think I know what’s important to our employees.”

DiTondo succeeds Miriam Keener, who retired last year.

With about 62,000 employees companywide — including 52,000 in Southern Nevada — human resource functions at MGM Resorts are handled at the property level. DiTondo provides overall guidance and chairs a Human Resources Council consisting of the top human resources executives at each property.

Since her appointment in January, much of DiTondo’s time has been spent on the company’s new M Life customer loyalty program, which has been described as bringing a culture change to the gaming giant.

Besides her work at the company, DiTondo is an active member of the Asian Chamber of Commerce and heads its foundation.

She discussed human resources challenges at MGM Resorts with In Business Las Vegas.

IBLV: As chief of human resources for the state’s largest private employer, what’s your biggest challenge?

DiTondo: Most of the things I’m working on — M Life, our mission and values (initiative) — are geared toward how we engage our employees and get them to see value in being an employee at MGM Resorts over anywhere else.

It’s keeping that many employees engaged. A lot of our initiatives are focused on how we listen to what employees have to say. How do we respond quickly? How do we keep them engaged in their jobs? All of our leaders know that an engaged employee who likes what they do and where they work is better at providing customer service to guests. It’s hard to do with that many employees and that many leaders who manage them. Trying to do that across the company is a challenge.

What’s the hiring outlook at MGM Resorts?

We’re always hiring. We always have positions that are open. Even during the darker times in the economy, we still replaced positions that were needed based on volume.

Especially with pool season, we have hundreds of positions open. I think we staffed more than 400 positions for our pool season.

We looked at how to efficiently run our business over the last few years. As we see volumes increase in restaurants and rooms, those things all lead us to staff appropriately so we provide the right amount of customer service.

We’re optimistic. We’ve seen projections on visitor volume. In the first quarter we thought our convention bookings showed a positive sign for the year. We’re cautious because of all the news on gas prices. If something changes, people make decisions on whether to drive that weekend. Things can change quickly, but there are signs that are making us more optimistic about this year.

What’s going to make an applicant stand out as someone you’d want to hire?

Even with the different cultures at all of our properties, when someone is interviewing with one of our property leaders, showing you can engage our guests is the most important thing in the interview.

Even for employees in the back-of-the-house positions, there are times when they are crossing the casino floor and are in the hotel lobby. People who show they can stop, greet a guest and make a guest feel welcome are people who would shine in an interview and who we’d want to hire.

What’s your involvement with M Life?

Everyone thinks M Life is a players’ club. I think of it as a lifestyle we create for our guests. We think our employees drive that lifestyle, because they are a huge part of the experience.

That’s probably one of the biggest things I’m working on right now. The first quarter we rolled that out for our guests. In the second quarter we want to roll out what M Life means for our employees.

We see M Life as kind of a unifying brand. M Life links the brands, but individual brands like the Bellagio brand and the Mandalay brand are what’s most important.

The way we want to use M Life with employees is: What’s the value proposition for being an employee with MGM Resorts?

We have always done things like provide discounted tickets to employees or free tickets, or offers during certain times of the year, for instance, to go to the Adventuredome. Sometimes those offers are within a specific property that has that venue or show. If we want the employees to create M Life for our guests, the whole experience gets created by our employees. We want our employees to be able to experience our properties as guests.

If there’s a guest at the Mirage who asks, “What’s a steakhouse you can recommend?” that employee can recommend one at Mandalay Bay or one at Circus Circus or one at MGM Grand. They can say, “I’ve been to dinner there because we have this program that’s available to employees.” They can recommend you try X, Y or Z because they’ve been to dinner there.

We had these offers in the past. They’re stagnant, and they’re hard to find. If an employee wants to stay at the Mirage or has a friend coming from Michigan wanting to stay at the Mirage, he has to go on to an employee website and look through a number of pages to find an offer that may or may not be less than what their buddy can get through Expedia.

We’re working with our IT group to create a booking agent. An employee can go in and just like we offer room rates for customers — they change based on the volume — we would offer an employee a rate based on the day their friend is going to be here, how full the hotel is and a rate that’s better than what their friend would find if he went on the Mirage.com website.

We want to create that because we want our employees to actively encourage their friends and families to stay at our properties.

Our employees are asked all the time (about what deals are available). If you live in Vegas, someone’s always calling you for everything. Our employees would be able to say, “Here’s what we have.”

Instead of just looking at their property, they’d able to say, “Here’s what I can offer. Circus Circus is this much a night, Mandalay is this much, Bellagio is this much, where do you think you’d want to stay?”

We want to make it easy for our employees to book their friends, their families or themselves. The benefit of that is the employee who works at Mandalay Bay has experienced Mirage, and then can recommend Mirage to the guests they meet.

If M Life showed us something, it showed us that if we have an initiative or a call to action we can mobilize our employees. We trained almost all of our nearly 60,000 employees within a three-to-four-week period. We had contests and sweepstakes and the properties got really creative about how to get their employees excited.

And the related values initiative?

We had an employee value survey in March (2010). We asked employees what ideas or beliefs are most important to you and an employer? We had about 12,000 employees participate in that survey. We brought the presidents of the properties (and other executives) together (in the fourth quarter) to clarify the company’s mission, the company’s vision and our values. The values that came out of that were integrity, teamwork and respect as being the most important beliefs that are consistent throughout the company. We chose to only have three values that are critical to the company because our properties have their own values on top of that.

Part of what we want to do with M Life is educating our leaders and our employees and getting them to understand what’s the mission of the company, what do we see as the future of MGM Resorts and what does that mean to you?

MGM Resorts is regularly honored as a leader in diversity. Where is that initiative going?

Diversity is one of the things that’s core to MGM Resorts. We’ve trained 11,000 of our leaders in our Diversity Champions workshops. It’s core to who we are. It’s woven into the fabric into how we act and how we treat each other. Diversity is one of the things we always think about when we’re making decisions about recruitment of employees and recognition of employees.

We’re getting to the point where we almost don’t use the word “diversity” because it’s just how we think every day.

We have a goal we’ll accomplish this year of getting all supervisors and above trained. Part of the 11,000 we’ve trained includes front-line employees and some nonsupervisory staff. Our big milestone is every supervisor and above will have completed Diversity Champions training this year.

Once we reach that goal, what’s next? We want to start looking at the core of our employee base, the front-line employees. How do we get them engaged in that same type of initiative?

How’s your relationship with unions?

Since starting my role at the Flamingo I’ve always worked with the union leaders and union business agents and considered them to be partners when they’re representing employees on our properties. We have several initiatives — the Culinary Union being our biggest partner — like the Hope Coach (Nevada Cancer Institute’s mobile mammography clinic) focusing on getting more women from all ethnicities and backgrounds to go through mammograms once they reach an age where early detection is important.

We have times when we have contracts that are negotiated that we get into more challenging conversations. But the majority of the time we deal with unions, we’re partners with them.

How do you deal with employees saying that because of inadequate staffing they’re having trouble getting their work done?

All of us, including myself, have said over the past couple of years as we’ve tried to become more efficient, that’s meant changing the way we do things. Even in HR there are processes we’ve changed to make them more efficient. Sometimes change is hard. We may make a process more efficient, but I myself might keep doing it the old way, so I’m not getting the benefit of the efficiency.

We’ve heard that from employees at all levels. As business has picked up we’ve tried to staff according to the business levels. Business levels decreased a couple of years ago so we had to staff appropriately. As we’ve seen some business come back, we’ve had to staff appropriately. Sometimes there’s a lag in how quickly that happens. We’ve tried to be empathetic with our employees because we know there are some weekends that suddenly pick up and there’s more demand than we planned for. All of our properties do a great job of employee recognition, so when people do have to go above and beyond, we have programs with how they reward people for what we know is hard work.

How does HR help keep the company in compliance with laws covering employment discrimination?

We have mandatory training for all of our supervisors or above around a number of different employment laws, particularly harassment and discrimination. Those classes are taught three or four times per month. We track when you’re required to go through it and if you don’t go through the class by the time you’re required to, that’s something that’s important to our chairman (Jim Murren,) that he knows which managers haven’t gone through the training.

It’s so important to us that by the time that deadline passes, that list is pretty small. People don’t want to be singled out as not having attended.

We track it. We monitor it. It’s a requirement of all of our leaders to regularly get refreshed on harassment, discrimination and workplace violence. Those three are mandatory. We stay up with the law. The intent of that is for a manager to avoid any behavior that could be perceived as discriminating, and to also be able to report cases quickly so that they’re dealt with at the property level by human resources doing their own investigation. We deal with those issues pretty swiftly.

Employees can always go to their property HR department. We have a compliance hotline that if a law is being broken, someone can report it anonymously to the network phone number 24 hours per day. Or they can call the corporate labor relations department, if the employee doesn’t feel comfortable talking to someone at their property.

The intention would be we would be free of these issues. When it does happen we take it very seriously and we act quickly.

You’ve seen a lot of job applicants. Are the public schools and colleges doing a good job of preparing students for careers at MGM Resorts? They do have budget issues.

Five years ago we saw people we were considering for jobs who we wish were more qualified. In the last couple of years we have seen people really qualified for jobs and the challenge we’ve had is being able to interview the number of applicants we have and select the right people. We do have a lot of qualified people applying for positions now.

Jim (Murren) and I have talked about this. He has an interest in doing what our company can to support the School District. Especially given where the School District is with budgets.

We’ve done a lot of things to support the school district and to prepare those students we can touch for careers in our industry.

With the numbers we have in Las Vegas, our employees have responsibility for about 32,000 students in the School District. If we can think of ways to give our employees the tools to help their students be better students, that’ll help us overall — the School District, the economy and the employer.

An example is the School District has a website where you can check the status of your child’s homework. Giving our employees access to that while they are on their break or lunch is one way we can help get our employees engage in the School District.

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