Your options with the business.roleplay.agency
Professionally trained partners in a conversation simulate challenging communication scenarios and in doing so offer you a range of unusual yet effective opportunities in online and on-site role play!
What is role play exactly?
In a roleplay, a person playfully enacts the role of somebody else. Already in childhood we make use of this form of imitation to acquire various social abilities, but adults as well can appreciate the possibilities this method has to offer.
What is role play used for?
For entertainment
Role play is entertainment because the option to “play at being someone else” gives you a chance to immerse yourself in a playful sphere via online and on-site enactment. Role play allows for a stimulating and multi-layered experience in a fictional space.
As a research method
Role play can be used as an experimental form of research and is used successfully in psychotherapeutic practices as a way to learn new forms of behaviour or to illustrate and clarify the inner condition.
Learning to solve conflicts
In role play, critical situations and conversations, like how to address a conflict, can be tried out and played through in a safe space. The realization of a specific idea on how to address a given situation in a role play and the possibility of behavioural training through repetition facilitate the learning process – especially when the scenario is not only rhetorically but emotionally challenging as well.
For diagnostics
In organizations or companies role play can be used for diagnostics: Imagine someone preparing to take on management and leadership tasks. In a standardized procedure, he or she is asked to perform a realistic and challenging management task in a conversation with a colleague or member of staff as a role play scenario. The evaluation of his or her performance provides the basis of recommendation for further development.
What does role play have to offer for organizations?
Training
As part of training courses roleplay can be used in classical behavioural training: After outlining and showing the targeted behaviour, I survey and conduct its imitation by the participants in a role play. This way I can relay for example pre-appointed and prudent behaviour in customer interaction or practice appraisals and talks with colleagues and employees.
Securing Transfer
When securing transfer, a roleplay helps me to assess what a person has already mastered. I engage the person learning a new skill set in a situation, which we previously discussed in the seminar. By playing through the simulation, I can test whether he or she has already picked up the new behaviour in question. This not only allows for specific and targeted feedback but also for an assessment of the transfer of my teaching process.
Recruiting
When recruiting personnel, role-playing is soften used as a viable way to assess whether someone possesses the necessary social skills and required characteristics such as empathy or guiding a conversation. A role play can be incorporated ad hoc in a job interview s well as be a part of systematic diagnostic procedures like an assessment center.
Developing personnel
A role play enables me to determine someone’s individual potential he or she can access when in contact with people and what specific measures or training options can support him or her in their development. In an orientation center, development center and status assessment, a diagnostic role play allows me to give specific feedback and formulate the next steps to meet development goals.
What is an assessment center, a development-center, an orientation-Center…?
These and similar terms denote systematic procedures in recruiting and developing personnel. They all function with a common principle: Participants engage in the simulation of various, demanding situations requiring the use of certain characteristics and skills. Several observers evaluate the performance along predetermined criteria. The results are gathered, compared and assessed and become the basis for a feed-back for the participants.
The participants in these procedures receive tasks requiring methodological skills in the form of case studies and InBox-exercises. Presentations call for skills in rhetoric and motivation. Role-playing and tasks as a team reflect on an individual’s ability for cooperation and leadership. Particularly the simulation of conversations with customers, employees or colleagues in a project can give specific indications for the, otherwise difficult, assessment of empathy or behaviour in a conflict.
Assessment centers designed for the selection of a candidate have a predetermined profile based on the position to be filled; requirements which the applicant should meet. Development-center and orientation center bring about instructive information for participants and Human Resource alike. Thes elaborate procedures, properly conducted, make for a high quality in the assessment of potential and allow for specifically targeted recommendation in the development of future specialist and leadership personnel.
What does a professional role player do in an assessment-center or an orientation-center?
Let’s imagine a role-player is booked for an assessment center. He or she is provided with the scenario of the conversation to be played out, studies intimately the description and internalizes the pre-fixed situation in order to portray the difficult customer, the dissatisfied employee or demanding conversational partner adequately.
On the day of the event, the professional role player takes on the role of the carefully measured but demanding interlocutor in the simulation of the conversation. He or she takes care to provide an equal challenge for all participants, highlights and accentuates the conflicts and misunderstandings with his play but without taking charge of the conversation. Thereby, the observers gain a clear insight into the abilities but also the limits of the participant, displayed in the given situation.
The advantages of employing professional role players from an external provider are their particular skill in passively stearing and guiding a conversation and their ability to carefully measure out and regulate their play to meet the requirements, thereby highlighting the predetermined criteria for observation and evaluation. In addition, there is no danger of damaging the relationship between employer and (future) employee, as the role players are not members of the company’s staff and therefore enjoy a high level of acceptance by both participants and organizers/observers in the procedure.
What we offer as business.roleplay.agency?
We are experts when it comes to personnel diagnostics and the assessment center method. Furthermore, we can perform nearly any type of operational simulation or scenario in the business context. For example you can add the challenge of an online conversation to a job interview, complex personas can be “filled with life” or important negotiations practiced and played through thoroughly to ensure its success.
Simulations allow you to engage in a learning process based on the factual requirements without running the risk of real damage in case something “goes awry”. In simulated conversations with the professional partners of the business.roleplay.agency all types of negotiation, consulting or conflict scenarios can be enacted authentically and in depth to be used in your training or diagnostic procedures.