Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority

How do you increase the number of visitors to one of the world’s top destinations while maintaining your position as the No. 1 convention and meeting location?

How do you do so while not skipping a beat over the next three years? And how do you concurrently expand your facility without having all that construction harm your high-level customer service?

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) faced that exact dilemma.

To remedy the situation, its team engaged IDEAS to create an ongoing sustainment program for their staff to “live that brand” daily.

Developed with the LVCVA’s HR team, the IDEAS enculturation program spurred collaboration and teamwork while empowering creativity and problem-solving among employees. Together, they could proactively understand how each of the departments and business segments connect.

The LVCVA is in a unique position. It represents not a single company or even one organization. The territory it covers comprises a variety of resorts, attractions, entertainment and recreational activities that millions of guests enjoy annually.

So, how could it generate and deliver on a brand promise when it’s making that promise on behalf of so many entities?

The answer lies in understanding a place’s core culture by listening to the lore, traditions and collective experiences of the LVCVA’s people.

The IDEAS Solution

At IDEAS, we started by facilitating a StoryJam™ to uncover this core story as the foundation for this initiative. Next, we began the Culture Mapping process with the entire staff to understand their current work culture.

We followed with a comprehensive Enculturation toolkit to hit key points:

• Address organizational challenges
• Provide the necessary training tools
• Offer support to leaders and frontline employees

We needed to understand the realities of the people who must deliver on the service level that the LVCVA’s brand promise pledges. As a result, we could relate the initiative’s big goals to employees’ everyday job responsibilities.

Armed with the knowledge of who the LVCVA people are, their stories and how they communicate and learn, we began.

First, we onboarded both existing and new employees with the organization’s expansion goals and revitalized service mission via group communication sessions, aka Gatherings.

These Gatherings contain facets that lead to a cohesive whole:

• Facilitation by the HR team
• Interactivity
• Video elements
• Subject matter experts from various departments who share their LVCVA contribution stories that other employees don’t usually know

The response and immediate results have been dramatic and transformational for the LVCVA.