"Go directly to Chef ’s Office. Do not pass Go. Do not collect 200 yuan.”

These words bring peals of laughter from the foodservice and sales staff at the Pudong Shangri-La in Shanghai, where a fun, fruitful staff training program is in full swing, and everyone’s attention is focused on a giant Monopoly-style game board spread out in one of the hotel’s ballrooms.

“Shangopoly,” created by Pudong Shangri-La Executive Chef Robert Blackborough, is the hotel’s unusual—and effective—way to train its F&B staff while building team spirit.

“Some people are passionate about training; some aren’t,” says Blackborough, who oversees nearly 400 chefs at the 952-room luxury hotel overlooking the Huangpu River in Shanghai’s Pudong area. “We wanted to be a bit of a kicker, especially for the new people in the company. Training has to be more than just someone standing and talking for two hours at the front of the room.”

SHANGOPOLY’S CREATION
Blackborough developed his philosophy of having fun while learning during his time leading foodservice operations at the Singapore Shangri-La in 2005. There, he found gaping holes in the knowledge of key foodservice details on the part of the catering and event sales staff.

“We had few training materials, no passion, and no relationship between our chefs and the sales staff,” Blackborough recalls. “Chefs were constantly fighting with the sales staff, saying they didn’t know what they were doing. But you can’t yell at people if you haven’t taught them. To make my life easier, I starting weekly training, got the chefs involved, and had a little fun.”

The weekly training sessions morphed into a manual for the Singapore Shangri- La. Five years later, Blackborough joined the Pudong property and continued to refine his interactive training techniques. The result was Shangopoly, an interactive training program inspired by the classic Monopoly board game.

“It’s a way to throw chefs and salespeople together in teams and spend about two hours of ridiculous fun,” Blackborough says.

SHANGOPOLY DETAILS
The Shangopoly game board nearly fills a ballroom. It measures about 42 feet square, printed in China on sturdy vinyl at a cost of about $500.

Colored “street” squares are named after the Pudong Shangri-La’s various banquet rooms; “railroads” have been transformed into the hotel’s four main restaurants; “jail” is the chef ’s office; and the “hotels” purchased by successful players are named after various Shangri-La properties. The dice are carved from two-foot-high blocks of Styrofoam. The playing pieces are larger-than-life carved statuettes of hotel staff. Shangopoly drops the money element to save time.

In order to advance around the board, players roll the dice and then must correctly answer an F&B-centered question from a stack of cards.

“If they get to, say, the Harbin Room square and answer the question correctly, they earn a hotel for that square,” Blackborough explains. “If later in the game they happen to get a banquet order from one of the Community Chest cards, and they ‘own’ banquet rooms in the hotel, they’ll be able to ‘host’ the function and earn points. If they don’t, the card goes back on the bottom of the deck.”

The goals of the game are twofold. On one hand, the questions on the cards are aimed at shortening the banquet sales process by giving staff the tools to sell events to customers. “We’re trying to give them as much info as possible at the time so they can look at the menu and show it to guests without having to come back to us too often with questions,” Blackborough says.

The game’s other function is to help Blackborough gauge staff knowledge. “As the teams answer various questions to advance around the board, I can assess how much knowledge they have of various topics,” he says.

SHANGOPOLY EFFECTIVENESS
Since its debut early this year, the Shangopoly game is being used several times a month. “We use it for new hire staff as a tool to see what they’ve learned about our hotel and if they can find their way around,” Blackborough says. “We also use it in team-building or in-depth training analysis. We’re even sharing it with other divisions of the hotel.”

The game’s effectiveness is quantified in numbers and beyond. “We have many measures in our operations for tracking what impact our training or procedures have on guest satisfaction,” Blackborough says. “We’re finding this type of training has been far more effective. The results are easiest to see by the overall feel of the staff with regard to teamwork and the stronger synergy between the F&B, kitchen, and events and sales departments.

“[Training games such as Shangopoly] are the kind of creativity that people in our field need to be doing,” Blackborough adds. “Our jobs are so much more than a chef standing behind a stove cooking and simply handing the food off to service staff for delivery. There’s so much more to the job.”

Blackborough’s advice to other hotels: “Be creative in your approach,” he says. “With the Y Generation and rapidly evolving technology, your staff will quickly get bored with work and training. If you can’t capture their interest and imagination and use it to your advantage, you’ll waste time and money trying to develop people who won’t perform to their maximum capabilities.”

Janice Cha has covered the foodservice industry for more than a decade, focusing on kitchen equipment for the past seven years.

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