LIGHTS CAMERA. ACTION! TRAINING YOUR EMPLOYEES WITH ROLE-PLAY
By Pam Simos

Are your teams providing their best performance to every guest that walks through your doors? Incorporating role-play into your training programs will help your guests receive an encore performance every time.

Role-play conducted in the business sector is very similar to the role-play used to train actors. Role-play helps actors practice their lines and get in touch with feelings and emotions of a character. Role-play is one of the most effective tools in the trainer’s toolbox where participants can experience real-life situations and “learn by doing.” Role-play can be used to train any level of company personnel including managers, directors and even company executives.  Role-play supports the Chinese proverb: Tell me and I’ll forget, Show me and I’ll remember, Involve me and I’ll understand.

When used in our hospitality industry to train hourly team members and managers, role-play allows teams to experience real-life situations in a simulated and controlled environment. With participants playing the roles of guests, employees, and managers, they can be better equipped to handle situations. Role-play achieves two main goals and helps teams:
Acknowledge and understand the true feelings of a person experiencing a situation as they play the role of that person. Walking in someone else’s shoes allows one to see how others feel and perceive their actions and behavior.
Enhance skills by learning and practicing techniques in areas such as: handling complaints, coaching team members, interviewing, telephone etiquette, suggestive selling and more.

Because of the controlled environment, role-play allows the trainer to assess an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and devise an action plan for growth and development.  When used to master a skill, role-play builds confidence as the skill is practiced and a trainer administers coaching. Since the trainer is side-by-side with the learner, they can easily determine if the learner has mastered the newfound technique and is ready to work their position solo. When role-play is used to empathize with another person’s feelings, it allows the teams to recognize those feelings and understand the effect of their or other’s behaviors. For example, role-playing a guest situation will allow them to better understand how a guest feels. As a result, they will learn the level of service that should be provided to deliver a quality experience. Another example is for team members to understand the feelings associated when a coworker continually arrives late to work and the stress it places on the entire team. Group discussions held after role-play can generate valuable feedback and be a key learning experience. An extension of role-play that has numerous benefits is having team members from one department work in the positions of their coworkers so everyone is aware and knowledgeable of each other’s jobs and the feelings associated with a particular job role.

How To Get Started
Prior to the scheduled training date, company assessments should be performed to determine the specific areas of performance/improvement to be addressed. Assessing your business by eliciting feedback through shopping evaluations, comment cards and other survey tools will provide valuable feedback to help determine the needs in the development of a master role-play plan.  Ranking the areas based on the highest opportunity cost will allow you to tackle the chief priority areas first.

Then, the company facilitator should determine the overall results to be accomplished and how the issues will be best addressed. For instance, the trainer should determine if the issues are based more on learning feelings or strengthening a skill.

Next, the company facilitator should determine the specific characters associated with the issue and the particular roles they will play. There are many roles that can be played such as a guest and service representative, a manager and team member, a service representative and kitchen team member or another combination.

Finally, the company facilitator, armed with the necessary scripts and scenarios, can then develop training aids and other training tools to address the overall goals of the program.  

To give you a head start, we have listed some suggested scenarios that will help you develop your role-play for teams to acknowledge and understand the true feelings of a person experiencing a situation. The job positions of a particular scenario can be easily customized to adapt to your style restaurant.

Suggested Scenarios

1. Cashier talking on the phone and not acknowledging a walk-in guest
2. Server being abrupt and rushing a guest while taking an order (asks questions in a curt, quick manner and displays rushed body language)
3. Server being overly friendly and talking too much with a group of business guests having a meeting
4. Server scolding a kitchen worker about an order made incorrectly
5. Host/Hostess being sarcastic and short-tempered when a guest is asking for menu information
6. Host/Hostess defensively telling a guest, ”I told you the wait was 20-25 minutes. You only waited 10 minutes.”
7. Bartender being cold and unfriendly while a sole diner is looking for attention and conversation
8. Bartender chatting with some regulars and ignoring a guest who obviously needs something (beverage refill, a napkin, condiments etc.)
9. Two bus persons talking about personal issues while ignoring a guest’s signal for service
10. Kitchen team member loudly demanding a server to pick up an order
11. Dishwasher being disrespected as servers throw dirty dishes without scraping them first
12. A problem team member causing coworkers to do extra work; creating disagreements among the staff; undermining management; constantly being late, etc.
13. Manager telling the guest “no” or “we can’t do that” without apologizing, adding an explanation or offering options
14. Manager pointing his/her finger and arguing with a guest when handling a complaint
15. Manager threatening a team member’s job

Before starting the role-play, always ask for volunteers so the shy or less experienced team members can watch others first to help build their confidence. 

Outsourcing a Training Professional
Retaining an outside professional to train your teams is an option that should be considered. First of all, the outside professional does not come into the company with biases and prejudice that may exist in the workplace and they can view situations from the outside in, making them more objective than company facilitators. Secondly, they perform numerous role-plays and are equipped with assessments, scenarios, scripts, props, and the necessary training aids to make the experience fun. Thirdly, professional trainers know how to put people at ease and participants are more apt to take the trained professional more seriously than an in-house facilitator knowing that the training specialist does not have any preexisting ties or friendships with participants. Also, a training professional is quite valuable in addressing senior management and executives. They can present situations in a different light, allowing them to see how their behavior and verbal/body language may be affecting the workplace and can implement change more readily than a company facilitator. In addition, since they are not part of the company structure and chain of command, there are fewer barriers when addressing a situation.

Alkis Crassas, President of EVOS USA, Inc., a healthier fast food chain, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, routinely uses role-play and says, “Although role-playing pushes the envelope by placing participants in the limelight, after the butterflies disappear, it will smooth out and your team will begin to see the big picture goals of your restaurant.”

If role-play is designed properly and effectively executed, it can be very valuable to the success of any company. Role-play adds to the life experience of each participant and when people experience something, they will take that away with them more so than any book, video or lecture could ever replicate. Most importantly, role-play is interactive and fun, and training that gets people laughing will be remembered. 

Pam Simos is the President and Founder of Five Star Training. She is the creator and presenter of a series of hospitality seminars and has more than 25 years of experience in the hospitality industry.

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