Program helps Las Vegas convention workers manage slow season

Anyone who works in the convention industry in Las Vegas knows that there are plenty of meetings and trade shows in the spring and fall and workers keep busy, but that the summer months and December can be pretty light.

But Weston, Florida-based UKG, a payroll management company, and Encore, an event technology company with a major presence in Las Vegas, have developed and implemented an overtime savings program that enables convention technicians to bank pay during their busiest times and use and collect it during the slower months.

“You don’t want to put on meetings and events when people want to take vacations or holidays,” Encore President and CEO Ben Erwin said in an interview.

“And you tend not to want to meet in markets that are either, like Chicago where I live, really cold in the winter, or maybe Las Vegas, which can be quite warm in the summer. And so that seasonality puts financial burdens on our team members.”

To remedy the situation, Encore became the first company in the United States to offer an overtime savings platform for team members, where they save excess money they’re making during very busy times and can draw on those savings during light periods.

Encore worked with UKG to develop “UKG Wallet,” the storage location of an employee’s funds.

Incentives to join the program

Encore incentivized the program by offering workers $100 when employees put $500 in their UKG Wallets.

Cody Browne, a technical lead for Encore, is among the 12,000 worldwide Encore employees — 7,000 in the United States and 700 in Las Vegas — that is choosing to enroll in the new program. He hasn’t experienced benefits just yet, but has worked with Encore long enough to recognize the seasonal swings the industry experiences.

“I would just save money and paid time off on my own to account for that, but this makes it a whole lot easier,” Browne said.

“You can actually choose what percentage you want moved over to the wallet so what I’m thinking of doing is saving up so I can take a nice vacation when I feel like it,” he said.

He recently put in extra hours for a conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and has banked some of his pay for future use.

“Encore has always believed its team members are the heart of our story,” Erwin said.

This people-first mindset motivates us to constantly be evolving our team member experience and innovate around challenges, like the impact of seasonality, that the industry previously viewed as immutable.”

Erwin said the company expects the program will help retain many of its employees that may look to other careers or job options.

Upon early launch of the program, the UKG Wallet product usage increased 10 times over the prior year’s period.

“Financial stress is not a problem isolated to our industry, it’s a stressor for nearly everyone,” said Charlie Young, Encore’s chief human resources officer. “Nearly 70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and Americans spent $9 billion in bank overdraft fees in 2023. The more we can do to reduce stress for our team members, the more focused they can be on our customers.”

Encore’s success with UKG Wallet is just the latest in its history with UKG. An return-on-investment study conducted by third-party analyst firm Nucleus Research in 2018 showed that the company achieved annual savings of more than $20 million with the UKG Pro Suite’s data and reporting capabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Encore leveraged people analytics in UKG to recover $48 million in tax credits and subsidies from the U.S. and Canadian governments, which it used to keep hundreds of employees on active status.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or call 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on X.