3 Ways to Power Employee Engagement Beyond the Survey

3 Ways to Power Employee Engagement Beyond the Survey

So you’ve rolled out your employee engagement survey and find yourself with some interesting insights! Now what? If you’re not sure what to do with that data, you’re not alone. Most companies don’t know how to operationalize these insights to truly improve performance and the employee experience. But there’s not a moment to spare right now.

In a trend that kicked off in 2021, more than 47 million people quit their jobs last year, and a record-breaking 4.5 million Americans quit in March alone (BLS), amounting to 3.0% of the workforce. Without a strategy for putting your employee engagement survey insights to work and a roadmap for operationalizing your culture , you may keep losing employees.

The Problem with Employee Engagement Surveys

Originally a human resources concept, employee engagement has taken on broader context and value in the modern workplace, serving as a measure of employees’ dedication and enthusiasm for their job, managers, co-workers, and the organization. 

However, HR departments often find it difficult to get employees to complete these employee engagement surveys. Sometimes, when workers do fill them out and HR discovers a department has a morale problem, it can be just as difficult to get those workers to speak up and explain why they’re unhappy. There’s good reason for that.

Employee engagement surveys, and the way they’re administered, tend to have flaws that either prevent leaders from truly understanding morale at their companies, or from doing much to lift morale if it’s low. Many surveys ask information about the respondent’s department, general title, compensation level, years with the company, and so on – making anonymity unlikely. Often, employees suspect that managers will easily figure out which replies were from whom, casting doubt on how honest a respondent might be.

So if a survey reveals widespread discontent in a department or across the company, whether a leader will be able to address employee concerns will depend on how candid workers feel they can be with that leader. Surveys tend to serve as a poor substitute for daily face-to-face communication. The idea should be to create enough trust such that people can speak up without having to hide behind surveys. 

Your employee engagement survey will only be as successful as the effort and ability for post-survey culture change. When leaders do learn of morale problems through surveys, their reactions can range from denial and defensiveness to an embracing attitude that looks at the results as a baseline measure upon which improvements can be made.

Better Ways to Foster a Culture of Feedback and Stronger Employee Engagement

Use Shorter, Ongoing Feedback Channels: Use surveys to learn about your employees’ feelings on engagement. Let’s take a brief look at a couple of survey options:

  • Pulse Survey Feedback: Organizations can frequently perform pulse surveys, which consist of 10-15 questions on a specific topic. These quick surveys don’t take much of your employees’ productivity time, but they give you a real-time reading of the mood throughout your organization.
  • Career Mobility and Development Feedback: These types of surveys are typically peer-to-peer and subordinate-to-employee. They can help make the annual review process easier and more streamlined, but also provide valuable information on your employees’ career mobility plans. Employees now expect mobility and flexibility to move into different roles and to shape their workdays. But many employers do not create personalized progression plans for their employees. 

Conduct One-to-One Employee Interviews: Employee engagement interviews can be informal exchanges among managers or HR leaders and remote employees through phone calls or Zoom sessions. These might be helpful to conduct each month or quarter. They are an opportunity for employees to share any concerns, new ideas, comments, and for you to demonstrate that you hear and see the employee. These face-to-face check-ins can also help you nip problems in the bud – before they grow into mountains and this becomes an exit interview. 

Encourage Virtual Break: Employees naturally form relationships at the watercooler or taking 15-minute walks together. In today’s way of working, encourage your employees to make these breaks virtual. Recommend setting up a Zoom coffee break or a Zoom walk via social media posts. Thanks to smartphones, people can enjoy break time with co-workers just as easily and regularly as ever, which will help build trust and stronger relationships – translating into better engagement. 

Run Mood Meter Checks: Before the beginning of a meeting, ask everyone to respond with a quick phrase, single term, emoji, gif or meme to reflect a combination of their mood and personality – or ask for a rating between 1 to 10. These fun mood checks are low-key surveys without the intention of gathering feedback. Instead, these mood checks can be used to make sure everyone is having a good day and to see if you need to follow up with anyone after the meeting.

Mix It Up With Games Thanks to today’s amazing technological tools, you can create a seamless work environment for everyone, no matter where they are. Suggest that employees participate in fun activities such as:

  • Open mic sessions for singers, poets and comedians
  • Scavenger hunts
  • Gardening chats and seed-starting tutorials
  • Interactive video games
  • Team trivia

Real-Time Communication & Collaboration Tools for Better Connection: One of the biggest sources of employee frustration and discontent is a lack of connection and ability to collaborate effectively with teammates. With a communication & collaboration plugin to your already existing daily communication tools – Gmail, Outlook, Zoom, Teams, and Slack, you have access in real time to:

  • Tips to better understand team members’ learning styles, motivations, and values
  • An ability to create a more equitable and engaging experience for remote team members 
  • Actionable emotional intelligence data that helps team members work better with one another

The Next Step: Operationalizing Engagement

In addition to these tactics, consider what technology can do for you when it comes to putting your employee engagement survey insights to work. This means taking the challenges you uncovered during your employee engagement survey and identifying WHY employees feel this way and HOW to improve it. What are the behavior, motivators, and work energizers that have led to your survey results — the why?

Knowing if your team members are content or not, engaged or not, is not all that helpful. And it also does not help align your culture to business strategy, which is essential if you want to improve organizational performance. That’s where Humantelligence comes in. We help you understand the why and then provide the insights needed to align culture to strategy for a team, a functional group, a division, or the entire organization.

In the end, team members who are engaged and connected with their organization tend to feel that their position and efforts in the company make a difference. This feeling can inspire them to stay with the organization longer. They also want to work in a role that matches their values and builds their skills. 

The problem is, many employees are not in roles that match their skills or their values. Compounding that, employers are using a “warm body” approach to hiring, not considering the personality traits, motivations or skills of candidates. Because of that, employee frustration often comes through in the employee engagement survey results. Make sure employees are a fit for their role and that it aligns with their goals. 

As a result, your team’s performance and productivity will improve.

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Fostering these types of relationships among employees is a driver both for improved collaboration within and across teams as well as for retention.  Once a foundation of feedback has been set, sustaining it will become easier with each feedback conversation. Here's how the experts say to do it. How to Build a Continuous Feedback Culture To foster an environment of both personal and professional growth, people need to feel safe about giving and receiving feedback. A feedback culture is a fluid, two-way exchange between employees as well as employees and management. The end goal is a safe space where employees feel comfortable voicing their concerns, suggestions, and advancement plans while employers are equally able to express constructive feedback.A healthy feedback culture is one where feedback is the norm rather than a signal that something is wrong. That means when improvements are needed, asking for change won’t come off as awkward or out of the blue for either staff or employers. Instead, you’ll be able to enhance business processes while empowering employees to excel in their roles. Here are some ways you can start embedding a continuous feedback culture into your workplace.Set and reinforce expectations during onboarding, performance reviews, manager 1:1s, town halls, and department meetings for giving, receiving, and using constructive feedback. Train people to focus on the quality of the feedback. It’s worth noting that there is a difference between good and bad feedback. Encouraging people to say "good job" isn't going to improve employee performance or build an effective feedback culture. Building a culture of feedback starts with providing meaningful feedback - that is, feedback that is behavior based (not trait-based), forward looking (instead of backward), objective, continuous, in real-time and direct. Create multiple channels for giving and receiving feedback...like newsletters, email inboxes, surveys, town halls, office hours and more. Some folks like to write it out, while others prefer vocalizing -- be inclusive of how you solicit and provide feedback. Couple feedback with recognition so that employees associate feedback with a positive form of reinforcement. It will help reinforce the kind of behaviors that are helping move the organization. Make it routine. When feedback happens routinely, it becomes expected. Hold employees accountable by incorporating feedback giving and receiving KPIs. Ensure that managers are having regular feedback conversations and check-ins with their direct reports. Moreover, encourage employees to ask and share feedback.As a rule of thumb, more frequent, directionally correct but incomplete feedback outperforms more detailed and accurate but less frequent feedback. This means that consistency and iteration are what makes feedback good. When asking or giving feedback, many refer to the 30/60/90 Feedback Framework. It states that one should receive feedback when a task is 30% complete, again at 60% complete, and finally at 90% complete. Transforming your culture into one built on continuous feedback can propel your teams to approach tasks from a different perspective and find new solutions to your company’s biggest challenges. And the first step in your culture transformation is a team culture mapping, where we’ll help you unlock the behaviors, motivators, and work energizers of your team so you can empower better performance.

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Angry & Overloaded? Read This Before Your Next Email
Angry & Overloaded? Read This Before Your Next Email

Overwhelmed with Internal work emails? Yes! Too aggressive, too many, not enough, no response, or maybe just too many of the dreaded reply-all — you name it, as senders and receivers of emails, we have made ourselves miserable. People get dozens, even hundreds, of emails a day, and it’s easy to miss a thread—or just plain ignore them — not that you would! And we’ve all been there before…the premature Send of a strongly worded email that might just not go over so well. Generally, experts agree that about 130 business emails are sent and received each day per person. And with more people suddenly finding themselves working from home or in distributed teams, not only have digital communication tools been pushed to the forefront as a primary means of communication, but it’s become all too easy to hide behind our keyboards. Where you might usually speak to someone in person to organize a meeting or find a quick answer, remote working means making do with digital substitutes -- email being the number one fallback. As more and more folks enter the job market -- and new kind of workforce -- email continues to get complicated. According to Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist and author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, “I think it's a misconception that everyone in the modern workplace knows how to email, especially younger people.” She points out that people who got online after the rise of social media may never have emailed socially, instead becoming accustomed to the norms of other digital messaging formats, such as chat or social media posts. “People who have been online for 10 or even 15 years haven't been exposed to routine professional emails — routine emails for trying to accomplish tasks between people in a professional context." Further, in a recent study on the effects of email, a team led by researchers from the University of California-Irvine, hooked up forty office workers to wireless heart-rate monitors for twelve days. They recorded the subjects’ heart-rate variability, a common technique for measuring mental stress. They also monitored the employees’ computer use, which allowed them to correlate email checks with stress levels. What they found: The longer one spends on email in a given hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour. In another study, researchers placed thermal cameras below each subject’s computer monitor, allowing them to measure the tell-tale “heat blooms” on a person’s face that indicate psychological distress. They discovered that batching inbox checks—a commonly suggested “solution” to improving one’s experience with email—is not necessarily a panacea. For those people who scored highly in the trait of neuroticism, batching emails made them more stressed, perhaps because of worry about all of the urgent messages they were ignoring. The researchers also found that people answered emails more quickly when under stress but with less care—a text-analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count revealed that these anxious emails were more likely to contain words that expressed anger.  So when the number of emails sent and received in a day continues to rise -- only to be further complicated by varying email user levels -- your job as a sender (and receiver) becomes more challenging. The truth is that some emails are more effective—and likely to get a response—than others. Your email will be noticed and get the attention it deserves when it is written appropriately and geared to your audience. No matter what field, industry, or user level, a better email experience is imperative -- both from productivity and mental health standpoints -- and knowing how to write effective emails that achieve your goals is more vital than ever. When you’re writing an email, you want to do everything in your power to ensure the recipient sees, opens, reads, and feels compelled to act on it the way you’re hoping. Here are the email basics, some refreshers for those more seasoned senders, and a couple superstar tips for everyone! The Anatomy for an Email No matter what your email is about, they can all be broken down into the same basic components. Depending on the situation, you might not need to use all of these elements, but consider each one carefully based on your goals. Subject Line NEVER send an email without a subject line! If you do, there's a high likelihood it will remain unopened, whether the reader skips over it or it lands in their junk folder. Ideally, you write the whole email, then you write the subject line by looking at the email and saying ‘what is the three to seven-word summary of this entire email?’ This means the recipient can easily see what the email is about, whether any action is required, and how urgent it is that they respond.  Protip! McCulloch emphasizes the need to think of the other person when you’re choosing your subject line. For external emails, including their company name may be helpful for you as a unique identifier, but the name of your company will likely do more to distinguish it from other emails in their inbox. “A lot of people use search these days rather than folders to find old emails, and for search, you want to have your keywords, especially in the subject line,” she says. When in doubt or strapped for time, just be sure to clearly state what your message is about and set the right expectations. Stay away from subject lines that just say “Hello” or “Please read” unless you know the person well. The only time you don’t need to write a subject line is if you’re responding to or forwarding someone else’s message: In this case, you can just leave the existing subject line—unless you want to highlight a specific deadline or action item. Greeting You probably wouldn’t walk up to someone at work and just start talking about the report that’s due without saying “Hi” or even their name. Right? And in the new age of remote work where it’s likely you might never meet colleagues face-to-face, you probably shouldn’t do it over email either, and you definitely shouldn’t do it if you’ve never communicated with the person before. Start your message with an appropriate salutation (most commonly “Hi,” “Hello,” or “Dear”) and the recipient’s name. In most workplace communications, a first name only is just fine, unless the person works for a more formal company where using their full name might be more appropriate. Including a first or full name (if formality is warranted) is always better than accidentally mis-gendering somebody with a “Ms.” or “Mr.” For formal communications, particularly with people who have earned doctorates, it’s always a nice touch to include Dr. Body This is where you actually write the information that you want to send the person you’re emailing. Every email has a body, whether it’s a single word (“Thanks!”) or paragraphs (and paragraphs, and more paragraphs)—but please don’t make it too long! For professional emails, make sure that you keep your language appropriate for the situation and clearly state why you’re sending the message and what (if any) action you’re hoping the recipient will take after reading.  Don’t be afraid to use formatting for emphasis — colors, underline, or bolding — to call out particularly points, actions, or important dates. As we all know, CAPS are NEVER good. Now if you really want to get a response from your recipient, tailor the email! Make sure you deliver information in a way that speaks to them, in ways they learn or take in info best. How? Well, you need to know their EQ — and with a simple email plug-in, it’s right at your email-writing fingertips. See more in our tips section! Closing & Signature Your email closing is the (usually single) line before your name and/or signature. Skipping this can come off as rude or abrupt, so be sure to include one unless you’re emailing with someone you know well or you’re several emails into a thread. The most common professional email closings are “Best” and “Thanks.” Boomerang has done some work on closings that get the most replies here. But you can definitely change it up based on your preferences and the circumstances. Also, if you know your recipient well and she/he knows you well, a comedic closing -- especially for those long-winded but ever necessary novel-length emails -- is always entertaining. My go-to for my most verbose messages is always a classic: “Anyway.” When it comes to the signature, you typically end with your name as sign-off followed by your block of contact information. As recent trends suggest, always feel free to include your pronouns as part of your email signature. This helps create a culture where people can bring their full selves to work and gives people transparency into how you should be addressed. Email Tips & Reminders Here are a few tips and recommendations to make sure your emails are effective. If you want tips and trick for internal work emails -- those 1:1 colleague communications or emails to managers, bosses, departments, or company-wide -- get our quick tips in this 5-minute video on writing better emails today! Keep It Concise If sifting through your inbox in the early morning or late evening -- in between all the other work! -- you’re probably more likely to respond in the moment to something that’s a few short paragraphs at most as opposed to something that’s much longer. Keep your emails short and to the point as much as possible with a clear ask. Add a Personal Touch & Get Emotional Because you want to be concise, and written messages can sometimes lack tone, email can feel abrupt, but this is easily fixable. Being professional doesn’t mean you need to be robotic. So before you jump into the meat of your message, provide a quick pleasantry or find a common interest on which to comment...think sports, arts, family, hobbies, etc. You should also take it a step farther and flex your emotional intelligence muscle. Before you click send, take one last precautionary step to make sure your email lands just right! One of the most important, yet overlooked, tools in the email writing toolkit is EQ, and as we move into more long-term remote and hybrid work models, it’s going to be imperative to infuse emotional intelligence into your communications to optimize likelihood of response and action. With a simple plug-in, you (and the rest of your colleagues) will have the kind of communication-rich information needed to not only write better emails but also collaborate more meaningfully with one another.  Imagine being able to click on a recipient's address and see real-time tips and recommendations for communicating, motivating, and influencing them. Imagine seeing this same information in aggregate for a group meeting. Imagine knowing who best to tap on for specific asks, for helping lead certain initiatives, and who might benefit from a heads up on certain items — all of which takes into account your recipients’ behaviors, motivators, and work energizers in an easy-to-understand way. Some have called it “a transformational tool for remote work that allows for informed collaboration and communication.” Some might even say it’s the best-kept future of work secret that will help you communicate and collaborate better, understand individual and collective communication insights, and figure out how to re-energize the collaborative juices for teams who may have never met in person — and for purposes of this article, get your emails opened and acted upon!  State Your Intent In all email messages, explicitly say why you’re emailing in the first couple lines. Don’t make the reader guess at your point. At the end of your email, you might also include a call to action such as “Can you get me feedback on this deck by X day?” or even a clear statement that ‘no action is needed, just keeping you in the loop’ is helpful. Be sure the recipient comes away with the right information. Duh, Proofread! If you’re sending multiple emails a day, it can be easy to overlook this step (guilty as charged!), but you should be re-reading all (okay, maybe just the most important!) emails for spelling and grammar. This probably isn’t necessary for notes to colleagues you email multiple items a day, but for particularly important or delicate emails, it might help you catch that embarrassing typo or mistake before you hit send. Also to note, technically correct grammar and punctuation may be essential for someone working in publishing, for example, whereas people in another industry may take a less formal, more chatty approach. Regardless, correct grammar never fails. Make Sure Email Is the Right Avenue Just as important as knowing how to email, is knowing when not to do it at all. Sometimes a phone or video call is better if the topic is complex or sensitive. While a well-written and concise email is effective and allows the reader to respond in their own time, a phone call can sometimes take the place of multiple emails while getting much more accomplished and building a stronger relationship. An immediate answer might also be necessary given the situation and, because email volumes are skyrocketing, consider a direct chat. And as a final tip, emailers should always bear in mind that their messages may well end up in front of a much larger audience than they anticipated, whether through legal discovery, a leak, hack, or the dreaded un-anticipated forward. 

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Strategies And Tools For Improving Employee Performance
Strategies And Tools For Improving Employee Performance

Each employee within a company has the power to boost a company's success. For better or worse, the inverse is also true: Each employee has the power to drag down productivity and the organization's bottom line. Business leaders have become increasingly focused on finding strategies to improve the performance of employees to better serve and delight customers. At some point, each business leader needs to devise a high-functioning HR performance improvement plan that gets results. If you're struggling to develop an action plan for non-performing employees, it's probably time to take a deeper look at the issue to discover the right performance improvement plan (PIP) for your organization. Keep reading to learn how a PIP can help streamline your employee performance improvement process. What Is an Employee Performance Improvement Plan? A PIP can become a powerful tool to help struggling employees succeed or let ambivalent employees go for immediate issues and any thereafter. You might think of it as an on-the-spot, essential performance evaluation.  When you and your managers become painfully aware of a recurring or worsening employee performance issue, you must resolve the issue quickly and effectively. More employers today are relying on performance improvement plans, which are formal template documents that feature details regarding the specifics of your employee's performance issues. Further, it gives you the opportunity to create a clear list of goals that the poorly performing employee needs to succeed and a timeline to allow him or her to reach those goals. A performance improvement plan isn't always (nor should it be) a negative experience for an employee. Many employers also use it to help driven employees determine and plan professional goals and create measurable steps to achieve those goals.  How to Determine If Employees Should Face a Performance Improvement Plan Here are key steps to take to determine whether a PIP is warranted for your troublesome employee:Analyze the various possible factors regarding if the employee is not doing his or her job or meeting your organization's standards. Remove external factors, such as an unclear job description or requirements, miscommunicated professional standards, or issues and incompatibilities with management and co-workers.Once you go through these steps to conduct evaluations, you should move forward with a performance improvement process. What Are the Benefits Your Organization Might Experience With a Performance Improvement Plan? Employee turnover is expensive. You probably want to avoid termination and searching for a new employee. A performance improvement plan can help you correct a poor attitude, behavior or performance. Your employee might be experiencing personal turmoil. A PIP can help this individual see that his or her performance and productivity are failing. Your employee gets the chance to course-correct, and you keep a quality employee on board and avoid needing to invest in a recruiting mission. What Are the Components and Requirements That Comprise a Performance Improvement Plan? Performance improvement plans include numerous steps that your employee needs to follow to improve his or her work performance. That said, it helps for you to understand and follow some integral steps:Meet with and discuss the performance issue with the employee, letting him or her know you want him or her to succeed. Create achievable goals, such as hitting a certain sales figure or contributing input during team meetings, according to a set timeline. Maintain communications with the employee during the PIP process, providing accolades for improvement and questioning any lack thereof. Ask if the individual needs additional training or other assistance to facilitate his or her success. Evaluate the outcome when the deadline arrives. Make this meeting a discussion regarding how the employee feels about the process and outcome. Prepare to continue the improvement process. If you feel the employee is unlikely to succeed, you might consider an alternative solution, such as a transfer, demotion or termination.What Steps Do You Need to Take to Create the Improvement Plan? When determining that an employee is continually experiencing issues meeting deadlines, cooperating with team members, or providing customer satisfaction, it's time to create a performance improvement plan. Here are some actions to take at that point:Review the employee's job description and expected performance. Analyze the times when the employee has fallen short and any notable circumstances surrounding the issue. Consider what might help the employee succeed, thereby creating a path to improved positivity and productivity.When Is the Improvement Plan Needed? You can usually detect when someone is struggling to fit in with the corporate culture. You might also have a gut feeling when someone has checked out and doesn't care about his or her position anymore. Nevertheless, you can't let detection and gut feelings rule your strategic decision-making. Here are some instances when you should implement a performance improvement plan:Your company has taken on the PIP process as a means of dealing with performance issues. Your organization has no detailed prescription in your employee handbook for managing performance issues. You believe your employee is worth the effort that goes into a PIP due to a history of strong performance and a positive attitude. Your employee is experiencing personal challenges, and you want to offer him or her an opportunity to improve.Humantelligence Provides a Highly Effective Three-Step Process Humantelligence will help you improve employee performance without the stress and disruption that sometimes accompanies such a task. We offer a three-step performance improvement plan process that allows you to achieve a high-performing culture where everyone gets the opportunity and encouragement to shine. Our platform is here to help you measure and manage existing employees' performance levels. With our help, you can also hire employees whose attitudes align with your company culture. Our employee performance improvement plan consists of the following:Step One: Our quick and comprehensive culture self-assessment tool was designed to uncover your employees' and prospective employees' work motivators, behaviors, ideal work styles and life priorities. Step Two: Manage and optimize your workplace culture using data meant to culturally align your employees at the team, group, functional, organizational and departmental levels. Your accumulated data can help you understand why teams do or do not perform, and help you find ways to spur them to course-correct. Step Three: Hire effectively by using our talent fit tool and team analytics to find and hire prospects faster, speeding the process by 80%. Our talent management and development tool offers strategies and analytics to help you make the right decisions at every point in the employee improvement process.Ready to turbo-boost employee performance to improve everyone's attitude, confidence, conduct and achievements? Contact Humantelligence today.

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The Best Team Assessment Tools Help You Understand Your Team Dynamic
The Best Team Assessment Tools Help You Understand Your Team Dynamic

Collaboration makes the world go round, and having teams that consist of people whose dynamics work well together and are constantly working to improve themselves are key to sustaining business success. As an L&D and people leader, you likely already have an overall perspective on your team’s productivity and how it impacts the company's financial goals, but do you truly know what motivates and empowers your team to succeed? Do you know your team dynamic? The best team assessment tools will help you answer those questions. The Best Team Assessment Tools Measure Your Team Dynamic Successful teams must be agile. However, it’s impossible to be an agile team without fully understanding employees' behaviors, motivators, work energizers and the kind of work that truly engages them. Without this baseline knowledge, you run the risk of having a team that lacks problem-solving, seems disengaged, and exhibits poor team dynamics. For example, let’s say you are onboarding a new executive team member. Everyone on your existing team is a self-starter and decisive in their actions. Your new team member, on the other hand, is more team-oriented and deliberate. While the rest of your team is independently working on their initiatives, your new team member is trying to get feedback and approval from others. This disconnect between the new hire and the existing team may cause the new person to feel like they don’t belong and that they can’t engage with the rest of the team. Because of this, the new hire may decide this isn’t the right role for them and leave, ultimately leading to lost time, resources, and finances for the rest of the team. Understanding a Team Dynamic Archetypes are universal, inborn models of people, behaviors, or personalities that play a role in influencing human behavior. They were introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who suggested that these archetypes were archaic forms of innate human knowledge passed down from our ancestors. In Jungian psychology, the archetypes represent universal patterns and images that are part of the collective unconscious.  Jung believed that we inherit these archetypes much in the way we inherit instinctive patterns of behavior. He identified four major archetypes but also believed that there was no limit to the number that may exist. Of the four main archetypes described by Jung, one was the persona -- or how we present ourselves to the world. The word "persona" is derived from a Latin word that literally means "mask." It is not a literal mask, however. The persona represents all of the different social masks that we wear among various groups and situations. Over the course of development, we adapt and behave in certain ways in order to navigate society's expectations and norms. In practical application, an employee persona derives from this thinking and is the sum of one’s psychometric self-assessment. This sum is called a Humantelligence talent profile and details a team member’s behaviors, motivators or values, work energizers and life priorities -- using three primary business archetypes or personas. All together, the best team assessment tools take your team members' assessments into account and show you your team culture. The Benefits of Measuring Your Team's Dynamic Like the traditional customer/buyer persona, your employees’ talent profiles -- and their dominant personas -- are valuable on many levels -- and unlike the buyer’s persona, your employees’ persona summary is specific, personalized, and measured. As a result, use of this kind of data is nearly limitless. Here are just a few of the high-impact ways employee talent profiles are valuable. Greater Self-Awareness Once reserved for the executive level and requiring extensive consultation and workshops, deep insight into how you prefer to think, engage, and apply one's self is available for all employees. It’s that kind of self-awareness -- when people better understand their success factors and are more deeply engaged in their work -- that helps them leverage their strengths and more easily identify the kinds of opportunities that best align with their professional motivators and career goals. Accurate self-knowledge is the key to getting what you want out of life. And with a talent profile that goes deep into your behaviors, motivators, work energizers, and life priorities, employees can see their tendencies in real-life action and get the right guidance to help them achieve your goals. Improved Team Collaboration & Coaching So you’ve helped your team members become more aware of their tendencies. Great!  Now, it’s time to leverage these predominant behavioral themes for your team to achieve better communication and collaboration -- and that starts with elevating emotional intelligence across your team.  Imagine being able to take emotional intelligence insights from your team members’ profiles and put them right where employees communicate most often -- think meetings, chat, and email. You’re probably already using communication technology like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and more! But you’re probably not optimizing your use of those tools by integrating  emotional intelligence for your team. With a simple integrated plug-in, you can give your staff the kind of information needed to better communicate and collaborate with one another -- based on their talent profiles & personas -- taking all of the guesswork out of it and allowing them to spend time on the work that matters.For example, imagine giving every employee a collaboration coach that helps them work more effectively with anyone! We call it the HT Coach, and it uses assessment insights and applies AI to help team members work better together. With the HT Coach feature, all you have to do is ask a question (or use the pre-loaded questions) about your colleague, and like magic, you have a response that will help you communicate more effectively with your teammate. Imagine the day-to-day leadership training you could instill while encouraging better connection and collaboration among employees! You can do the same for a team and gain insights into the makeup of your team in order to drive productivity. You’ll see your team’s similarities and differences -- the overall team dynamic -- on a continuum with team strengths highlighted and potential gap identified. This kind of information can help you finally manage the dynamics in a way to drives team effectiveness:Map current vs. target cultures for teams or the entire organization Pinpoint strengths and gaps to identify necessary shifts -- what do we need more of or less of Understand what work motivators contribute most to your team’s cultureThen, take those team culture analytics and apply them to your hiring plans. Resumes, LinkedIn, and educational backgrounds only tell some of the story. Besides being self reported, they are limited to only showing past experiences — whereas leveraging a psychometric-based talent profile more clearly reveals a person’s fuller potential when it comes to situational behavior, actions, opportunities for improvement, communication styles, and values — now and in the future. Building Stronger Teams More Efficiently For each role, region/geography, and department within the same company, the needs will be different and there is no out-of-the-box formula or one size fits all approach. Each individual you add or remove from the team will play a part in your culture’s evolution. That means it’s imperative to hire and train individuals who share or have demonstrated the values you have identified as paramount, believe in your vision, and are excited about the work your team is doing. Consider employing technology designed to help you identify your team's strengths and blind spots so you can build stronger, more engaged teams.

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What You Might Be Getting Wrong with Personality Tests
What You Might Be Getting Wrong with Personality Tests

In the fast-paced realm of modern work, where remote and hybrid work arrangements are commonplace, the intricacies of collaboration have taken on a whole new meaning. Traditional personality tests, once heralded as the solution to understanding personalities and team dynamics, find themselves woefully inadequate in this landscape. The primary problem is that they lack accessibility because they aren’t seamlessly integrated into teams’ daily workflows. Even when accessible, personality tests demand interpretation and lose the essence of quick, actionable insights. Moreover, they focus merely on behaviors, overlooking the vital motivators, values, and work styles that drive individuals and teams. Yet, a more significant concern looms large — the emergence of AI, blurring the lines between professional evaluation and personal privacy. This article will explore strategies on how to use personality tests in team building through leveraging technology and AI to create and sustain effective team collaboration. A Quick History in Personality Tests in the Workplace The world of pre-hire and employee self-assessments is age old. Based on historically recorded information, the first pre-employment cognitive testing may have been used during the imperial examination in China, dating back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Its use was standardized during the Song Dynasty (960 AD – 1279 AD) as a civil service exam for candidates wishing to enter the state bureaucracy. The imperial examination tested candidates’ knowledge on topics such as civil law and fiscal policy, and helped the nation transition from a military ruling class to a scholarly one.  Objective personality testing began with Woodworth's Personal Data Sheet in 1917. That test was developed to identify soldiers prone to nervous breakdowns during enemy bombardment as well as shell shock during World War I. Soon after, many competing personality tests were developed for use in American industry. Many of these tests focused on the construct of employee maladjustment and were deemed important in screening out applicants who would create workplace disturbances.  As time went on, many types of personality assessment tools were developed. One famous test used in the early 20th century was the MMPI, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Established as a way of determining psychopathology, it was used in some cases as a hiring assessment until the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stopped its use as a violation of the standards of non-discrimination. Another, established in 1943, was the MBTI or Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, and it has served as a popular assessment for a number of purposes, including executive development. It was inspired by the work of renowned Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. While useful for staff development, it has demonstrated limitations in the selection of candidates. The use of other assessments and skills tests continues to proliferate the business world. Millions of workers take assessments each year as part of personnel selection, to improve collaboration and teamwork, and to identify next steps in a career path. On its own, personality testing is a $500 million industry, with an annual growth rate estimated at 10 to 15 percent.  Employers are continuing to use hiring, leadership, and employee mobility assessments to gather data points that will enable more informed decisions in the area most critical to the company’s success – its people. Making the wrong decision can be very expensive, so HR departments, executives, and team leaders rely on these tests – some with more success than others – even though most of these tools have failed to keep pace with the changing needs of today’s workforce. 3 Limitations of Most of Today’s Personality Tests Thankfully, assessment tools have evolved significantly since their early days. For example, the ability to take an assessment online, from anywhere in the world, has made them much more attractive than they once were, and algorithms can score tests quickly and easily. A wide variety of instruments can be used this way: Cognitive Ability Tests, Integrity Tests, Interviews, Job Knowledge Tests, and Personality Tests.  According to G2, there are 189 tools in the market – but that’s just a listing of pre-employment testing software! So while many of these tools are certainly continuing to evolve – albeit slowly – their limitations remain glaring, especially those in the personality assessment category.  To get any kind of value from these tools, many require external consultants or facilitators who are certified in particular assessment methodology. This then requires a highly manual implementation process whereby data is collected, aggregated, and analyzed by that consultant – and that takes time. This is why employer assessments have required an intermediary and remained within the domain of costly certified consultants. Personality tests are supposed to help you understand your team, build trust, establish psychological safety, and create an inclusive workplace culture. In remote or hybrid work environments, they fail to carry out that purpose for a few reasons:The test only measures behaviors, not what motivates an individual or team. Most assessments only measure behaviors and are vulnerable to multiple biases, misunderstandings, and interpretations with no chance of clarification. They're not sensitive to the employee's state of mind when the test occurs and may be biased due to the timing of its findings.  It fails to take into consideration change and adaptability. As an employee starts a job, they gain experience, try to develop every day, and subsequently adjust to correct previous shortcomings. These tests fail to allow room for that inevitable change and improvement. The results are not worth the expense. Assessments like the Myers-Briggs personality test and the Clifton Strengths test are costly and take a long time to be implemented. Additionally, further interpretation of the results can only be completed by a costly certified consultant or a psychologist.Common Challenges When Adapting to Remote or Hybrid Work Environments To complicate things, hybrid work environments are becoming the norm. This means employees must continue to get used to the mix of in-house and remote work and find ways to make virtual teamwork collaborative and successful. In trying to manage the hybrid workforce, here are some common challenges organizations encounter: Lack of connection: Remote teams mean personal and social connections are lost almost entirely. Members don't know their teammates, as there are no coffee breaks or lunch meetings where employees can sit together and break the ice. Mentorship and bonds between employees are hard to forge, and such a disconnect can make employees unhappy and less committed to the job. Lack of communication: Differences in how information should be relayed between workstations can be a big challenge. An example can be seen when a Gen Zer sends an email. Even if it contains lots of detail and information that a millennial recipient needs, it also has a lot of abbreviations and shorthand because that is how Gen Z likes to write. However, the millennial prefers more conceptual and formal communication and sees this email as unstructured, thereby ignoring it. The receiving person will likely delete the email and classify it as not worth reading, regardless of its vital information. Doing so leads to a loss in productivity and reaction time in completing that task. Lack of collaboration: Distributed team collaboration is a big issue within remote teams, as some employees might get left out of decision-making processes. Collaborating with remote teams takes more time and effort than with those who work together in person. This makes collaboration a big challenge in a hybrid work setting. It’s not all dismal though. Personality assessments can be very helpful in identifying the right kind of person for a role, to complement your existing team, or to help navigate conflict that currently exists on a team; and they can be particularly effective when aligning leadership teams. However, the most effective assessments are the one-stop shops that can serve multiple purposes at once: that is, use the data to hire and build more balanced teams, for leadership and team building, and to identify high potential employees and possible development and promotion paths.  How Do Technology & AI Improve the Impact of Psychometrics in the Workplace? Psychometric testing in the workplace through technology and AI acts as the glue that holds together different teams in the organization by helping boost connectivity. The following are just some of the many examples of how psychometric questionnaires paired with AI can enhance distributed team collaboration.Technology and AI connect all employees whether or not you've physically met them. They can track phone calls, virtual meetings, and related data to summarize when and how often people need to meet and connect. This helps to foster and potentially identify cultural aspects of the organization that are associated with productivity and performance. AI helps rewrite emails in various communication styles, all based on how the recipient likes to receive information – which reduces the friction among team members of different generations or backgrounds, thereby improving communication and mutual understanding within your workforce. It is responsible for suggesting and influencing virtual meetings for training, onboarding new members, and building good relationships – all based on actionable psychometric insights. Psychometric testing in the workplace builds an inclusive spirit by showing that differences can do wonders for teams that are willing to be open-minded and enhance efficiency. This diversity of thought leads to innovation and better problem-solving.Using Psychometrics in Your Existing Collaboration Tools In the digital realm, psychometric assessments are not just tools; they're catalysts in transforming remote and hybrid team dynamics. Imagine having essential insights at your fingertips, bridging the gap between colleagues you've met and those you haven't. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. Utilize them for personalized email communication and AI-driven suggestions, crafting impactful 1-to-1 interactions. Leverage personality insights in meeting invites, empowering you to prepare in advance, supported by AI's tailored prompts. In virtual settings, these psychometric insights about team members can guide training, influence strategies, aid in onboarding new members, and foster cross-functional collaboration in ways unlike ever before There are many assessment tools and plenty of hybrid work technology out there that can help you identify great candidates, opportunities for manager and leadership development, or areas of strength and improvement for teams. However, not every tool can do all of these things in the same amount of time – unless it captures data in three key areas: behaviors, motivators, and work energizers – and then aggregates that data into actionable insights you can use to improve your teams. And we can help.

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