Workplace Productivity: 8 Ways To Help Your Team Get Things Done
You can make your team an effective unit and help them get more things done by m...
Conducting a workplace personality test is a fun, unique, and effective way to boost productivity in your employees, your teams, and your business as a whole.
In this article, the management experts at Sling provide insight into the workplace personality test — what it is and how you can use the results to improve the way your team works.
What Is A Personality Test?
A personality test is a questionnaire or series of standardized tasks that measures personality characteristics such as emotions, preferences, values, and feelings.
Individuals can use this information for all kinds of purposes — to get to know themselves better, to reveal possible career paths, and to identify other personality types with whom they might get along.
Popular personality tests include:
- Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
- DISC Assessment
- Winslow Personality Profile
- Process Communication Model
- Holtzman Inkblot Technique
- Hexaco Personality Inventory
- Revised Neo Personality Inventory
- Birkman Method
- Enneagram
What Is a Workplace Personality Test?
A workplace personality test is simply the results of any of the above tests applied to the workplace instead of an individual’s personal life.
Businesses often use personality tests to measure interpersonal skills, motivation, inspiration, and behavioral traits in an attempt to gain insight into how a potential or existing employee might perform at a certain task, in a certain position, or in the organization as a whole.
For more information on personality types and how to motivate them, take a few minutes to read this helpful article: 16 Types Of Employees & How To Motivate Them.
Using Workplace Personality Tests To Boost Productivity
The workplace personality test is all about helping your team members get to know themselves, their teammates, and how they can work together better.
Here are several ways you can use the results of the test to boost productivity.
1) Discuss The Results With Each Employee
You can use results from a workplace personality test to help team members discover their strengths and explore career paths. But, first, you need to find out if the employee agrees with the results.
If they do agree with the results, they’ll be more amenable to applying what they’ve learned and discovering new opportunities at work.
If they don’t agree with the results, it will be very difficult to get them to incorporate the information into their thinking in order to explore new directions in their career.
At first, it is advisable to meet with each employee individually — perhaps during a performance appraisal or mid-year review — to discuss their results so they aren’t embarrassed by what they learn.
2) Review The Data With Your Team
Once you’ve talked to your team members one-on-one, meet with them as a group to review the data.
When doing so, it’s vital to emphasize the reason for revealing each person’s personality type: to help the team get to know each other better. It’s also crucial to provide as much context as possible.
Explain that managers can use the results to better understand their direct reports (and vice versa), and team members can use the results to better understand their coworkers.
This is especially true when it comes to communication style and conflict management.
3) Identify Ways To Improve Relationships
Another effective way to use the results of a workplace personality test to boost productivity is to harness the data to help improve relationships on the team.
When your employees get to know each other better (through the personality test), they can start to build empathy and emotional intelligence for the way their teammates think and act.
Empathy and emotional intelligence of this kind further contribute to team (and individual) happiness, engagement, and productivity.
Incorporate the results of a workplace personality test into a brainstorming session with the goal of coming up with constructive ways to improve relationships among team members.
4) Examine The Results To Reinforce Efficiency
Communication is sometimes difficult even among the highest-performing teams. Take the time to examine the results of your personality tests to help them communicate more efficiently.
When employees know how their coworkers think — and the best method of communication that is in accord with that thinking — they can tailor what they say and do to make their message as clear as possible and avoid misunderstandings.
Similarly, your team can apply what they learned from the workplace personality test to streamline and improve collaboration with their coworkers.
5) Incorporate The Data Into Your Hiring Process
Hiring the best person for the job has always been a challenge. A workplace personality test gives you one more piece of data on which to base your decision.
You can also use the results to identify gaps in your team’s skills and then work to strategically attract and engage new hires with the talents and personality types to augment the team’s culture and work style.
Build Schedules To Enhance How Your Team Works
Once you’ve identified the personality types in your business, you can use that information to build work schedules around the way your team likes to work. The Sling app can help.
Sling’s intuitive and well-organized scheduling tools make it easy to create a clear, easily readable schedule, while the cloud-based platform makes for easy storage and distribution.
Sling’s cloud-based program also provides a central location where employees can go to indicate when they can work and when they need time off.
Sling then incorporates this information into its built-in artificial intelligence and gives you reminders about double-bookings, time-off requests, and unavailability in real time while you’re creating your schedule.
All of these features — and more — help you perfect your work schedules to better fit the way your team works and to boost productivity in every corner of your business.
For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.
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This content is for informational purposes and is not intended as legal, tax, HR, or any other professional advice. Please contact an attorney or other professional for specific advice.
