Enlighten Theatre Workshop

Case Study 1

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The Challenge

I was approached by the Managing Director of an immigration company because several external forces, such as the continuing war in Ukraine and decisions/actions from high commissions and embassies in the UK, were severely limiting the ability for customer-facing staff to deliver a service to the standard needed, and was causing customer feedback to be poorer than desired. This was particularly apparent in the areas of delivering difficult news and dealing with difficult people.

 

The Solution

I suggested that some role play coupled with forum theatre would be a way to deliver the training, and wrote an interactive workshop that could be delivered both online and in-person to address these issues. The workshop was designed with a number of different scenarios, taken from real life experiences of the staff working at the company, covering the areas that needed addressing, including delivering difficult news and dealing with angry and/or frustrated clients. I engaged two professional actors to work with me and they initially performed a couple of the scenarios to groups of four or five people by way of an introduction and to elicit a discussion with a facilitator about the difficulties the staff were facing in their jobs. This was also an interesting way to ascertain what their expectations were about the training, as previously they had only been doing screen-based or written exercises. After this the participants were encouraged to take part in one of the scenarios, with an actor playing the part of the disgruntled customer, similar to the challenges they were facing day to day, followed by a discussion around what had gone well with the conversations and what might be done differently in the future. 

The Outcome

We saw nearly 50 people over the course of four weeks. Everyone took part in the role play sessions, even those who arrived reticent about the training and/or saying they were too shy to take part in the practical aspects of the workshop at the start. At the end of each of the 10 workshops we ran, everyone had something positive to take away with them. Here are some extracts from the feedback:

 

“I was a bit apprehensive because of how I will react to the scenarios or other people there. Will I behave normally or will I start stammering, go red? I thought normal training where you just write something, watch something, would be better. I was wrong.”

 

“You learn by looking at how other people cope. And this helps you.”

 

“I found it was really helpful to be person-to-person, to see people reacting.”

 

“Initially I was not looking forward to it, it’s not in my wheelhouse, but I enjoyed it, it was very useful. Learning to be calm, vocal tone, key phrases… they’re the main things I learned.”

 

I was also approached by participants after their sessions to say that they were using the coping mechanisms offered to them and finding it much easier to keep calm themselves, enabling them to deal more effectively with their clients.

 

The feedback from management was really positive, with several other leaders from the wider global company hearing about the success and contacting me to request similar training for their teams. And the best thing about this type of training is that you just have to change the scenarios and the focus, and you can adapt it to (almost) any situation.