Jyoti Chopra, MGM Resorts International chief people, inclusion and sustainability officer, gave the keynote presentation at the 2020 Global Gaming Expo, where she shared the company’s latest diversity and leadership initiatives. Chopra also touted MGM’s efforts to support recently furloughed and laid off employees amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Chopra, who joined MGM in November 2019, previously worked as a global inclusion executive for Pearson and BNY Mellon, and before that, she served a decade as MD for Merrill Lynch. Chopra’s addition to the MGM leadership team bolstered the company’s C-Suite diversity; she is a recipient of an Outstanding Asian Americans in Business Award. In Chopra’s first year with MGM, she has been at the forefront of the company’s new inclusion and diversity strategy.
“Anything strategy begins with a look at the macro environment,” Chopra said. “The starting point for us at MGM as we were thinking about our new HR people and talent diversity strategy was to understand the macro landscape and what was really going on in the world around us.”
In an analysis of its talent landscape, MGM uncovered eight pervasive people trends including a heightened emphasis on diversity and inclusion across the workplace; the rise of contingent workers and agility; a need for digital fluency amid technological advancements; and incorporating digital natives – the emerging millennial to Gen Z workforce – into its talent pool.
MGM also paid close attention to immigration policies and trends such as the tightening of borders across the world, Brexit and US immigration reform.
Chopra credited the increased focus on diversity and inclusion to a “surge of public advocacy and movements [and] the rise of legislation and regulation from this area.” According to her, approximately 70% of the total MGM workforce is diverse.
Chopra said, “We look at, for example, the Dodd-Frank Act Section 342 that called on financial service firms and banks to begin self-reporting their diversity data. Or you could look at the mandatory gender pay gap reporting that the UK government installed in the last few years where if you’re a company of more than 215 employees, you’re required to publish a gender pay gap report annually.”
The second key component to MGM’s diversity and inclusion strategy is a 10-part employee value proposition. The main theme to the proposition is supporting future employment and career opportunities for past and present workers. MGM also wants to create an environment that is inclusive, has a sense of purpose and is predicated on performance, according to Chopra.
“For us it’s about creating wow moments, if you think about employee experience, the candidate experience as an example,” Chopra said. “For our people, it’s also about creating and cultivating high performance culture and organization because our people are the ones that drive our results and really enable our business activities and business actions.”
MGM’s people-driven mission has run up against the realities of the pandemic. Since MGM reopened casinos in July, about half of its national pre-pandemic workforce of 70,000 employees is back to work, Chopra said. Chopra’s G2E keynote occurred before MGM’s Q3 earnings call, where CEO Bill Hornbuckle said the company had returned about 29,000 employees. The company reported a net loss of $525m for the third quarter. Net revenues fell 66% to $1.1bn, a result of reduced travel to Macau and Las Vegas.
In late August MGM laid off about 18,000 employees. During recorded question and answer session with a Wall Street Journal reporter, Chopra couldn’t give a timeline as to when employee figures might return to pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s our fervent hope, aspiration and ambition to bring our business volumes, our business levels and our revenues to where they were before the pandemic and to bring as many people back to work as we possibly can,” Chopra said.
To support former employees, MGM developed an alumni portal that launched on 1 September. Ex-MGM workers can request access to the portal, where they can add job and career preferences to their profile and sign up for job alerts. The portal includes employment resources through MGM’s partner organizations. The company also sends out job email campaigns and a monthly newsletter.
“Since we’ve launched this portal, we’ve had 22,000 hits to it and a lot of activity and utilization of the portal, so we’re really pleased to be able to make this available as a resource to our colleagues,” Chopra said.
In addition to the portal, MGM has taken other steps to support employees who have left their jobs or been laid off. The company hosts alumni network events and runs an employee emergency grant fund administered by the MGM Resorts Foundation. The fund has paid out over $14m to current and former employees according to Chopra.
Many MGM workers are parents with mouths to feed and children to send to school. These employees often work odd-hour shifts as well. Company managers are encouraged to be flexible and recognize the challenges placed on families, Chopra added.
“The majority of the workforce in the industry is hourly,” she said. “We have to recognize that. This is an industry that is always open. We have properties, resorts, customers that are on sight 24/7. It’s a tough industry and the demands are tough.”
The company offers families with children resources to access support structure. In late October MGM partnered with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), to offer free virtual tutoring for children of current MGM employees. MGM also runs a scholarship program for children of employees.
“The entire management team here recognizes that people’s lives have been disrupted,” Chopra said. “People have to do with unprecedented health and well being issues, loss of life tragically and children not being able to go to school.”
MGM’s leadership team has worked hard to improve its understanding of the communities its employees live in. The death of George Floyd, an African-American killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis in June, initiated a push for advocacy among company management too. MGM was one of a number of companies to adamantly reject racism and throw its weight behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Hornbuckle said in June that MGM would make a significant contribution to the NAACP to improve community relationships.
“Particularly in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the social unrest in the United States, we as a management team at MGM Resorts found that it was really important to be connected to our colleagues, to actively listen and hear concerns of what was on the top of minds of our colleagues and employees,” Chopra said.
The social unrest of 2020 spotlighted the lack of racial diversity in management positions among corporate America. Chopra said MGM has not made a quantitative goal for diversifying its leadership team but acknowledged the company has a ways to go in some categories.
“We have very strong representation actually at some of the management level ranks,” Chopra said. “Where we need to focus and improve is really in the senior levels of management at our company.”
To grow its management pool, MGM has launched The Accelerated Development Leadership Program, where a 52-member cohort meets on a regular basis to discuss strategies. Every member will be paired with a senior vice president level or above sponsor. Hornbuckle is among the sponsors for the program, which spans over the course of a year.
“We need to pull diverse talent up through the pipeline, particularly when you get into the president and senior vice president levels and above into executive management and the C-Suite,” Chopra said. “So we’re really taking this notion of sponsorship very seriously. We’re hoping that all of these collectively will help advance diversity and inclusion.”
