Wynn: Enhanced self-esteem key to motivate employees

Steve Wynn, chairman and chief executive officer of Wynn Resorts, is also included in Forbes list. Wynn told the magazine’s special centennial issue that the biggest question for him is how to motivate employees.

“You need to have a culture instead of a payroll, so that people watch themselves. What does this? Not money, but enhanced self-esteem,” Wynn said

“Spotlight programs, such as Employee of the Month, are great, but there’s honest prejudice built into them, as well as luck. So we retrained 1,300 supervisors to become something of a psychologist and learn how to evoke a story. Every day they hold 15-minute preshift meetings that start out like this: Who can tell us about something that happened yesterday with a guest? Then when staffers tell the story, we reinforce it. We thank them,” the gaming tycoon explained. “The supervisor calls a storytelling hotline. We then put the story on the in-house internet and plaster it on the walls. We make the storyteller a hero and do this hundreds of times a week. Now I have 13,000 people looking for a story – it’s the thing that brings them all together. Since the employees get to nominate themselves, they control their own enhanced self-esteem. That’s the key to paradise.”