Written by Donna Bonfield | 16th February 2022
Engaging your employees is easier when you understand them and their differences. Knowing how they think, communicate and work with one another can help build relationships and a positive culture.
Insights Discovery is a personality profiling tool designed to enable this, and here’s how it can help with engagement and retention.
Support personal development
Investing in your people is crucial for employee retention. This might involve technical or job-based training but also psychometrics such as Insights Discovery, which helps people to understand themselves and each other.
When you spend time and money on employee development, it shows your staff you value them as an employee and are invested in their growth and progression within the business. This is likely to improve their engagement and job satisfaction and as a result they would be more inclined to stay in the business.
Communication and connections
We’ve had excellent feedback from our Insights workshops – which are fun, engaging and help people learn about their colleagues and team. We also share tips and tools to take away immediately to help influence others, whether that’s the team, boss or customers.
Investing in training in general is great for individuals to feel valued, but will also make them more effective communicators and help the group work more cohesively as a team.
Build a positive company culture
One of the most valuable reasons you might choose to add Insights into your learning and development process is to improve your company culture.
By understanding your teams’ individual characteristics, how they work and how they communicate, it can help you to plan how best to introduce different ways of working and improve team effectiveness.
Recognising and valuing people’s differences in personality is also the first step to an inclusive culture and supports Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Inclusion isn’t just about protected characteristics, but diversity of thought – which can be explained by understanding personality traits and preferences.
Onboarding new employees
For new starters, understanding the type of personality traits and attributes they have can help ensure their first few weeks in your company are all plain sailing.
Psychometric testing is useful in this scenario because it can give you an idea of what motivates and engages your new employee, and how they may fit into your existing team.
And while it can be tricky to know exactly how an individual is going to react in a challenging situation, using Insights profiling can help you to understand what extra support or training they might need from you to be most productive in their role as quickly as possible.
Improve the selection process
Hiring someone who looks great on paper but struggles to settle in or, even worse, disrupts the team can be a costly and time-consuming mistake that as an employer, you’ll want to avoid. Luckily, personality profiling or psychometrics can be useful in recruitment, as part of a robust selection process.
Psychometrics must, however, be used with caution. You should ensure you use a tool that is designed to support a robust process, and never base any hiring decisions on personality profiles alone.
A broad selection process will ideally include a number of interviews, possibly supported by psychometrics, as well as some technical or job-based testing, for example, excel, work planning or presentations – whatever is relevant for the job role. Your psychometrics can help you build appropriate competency based questions to use in the interview e.g. looking for a logical thinker, a quick decision maker, a confident networker, but remember that personality profiles measure preference and not ability, so cannot be relied upon as a predictor of future performance.
In short, while Insights Discovery profiling can’t influence the kind of candidates applying for your job vacancies, it can really help you help them settle in to your culture and your existing team.
It will also help you understand yourself and your teams so that you can develop stronger, more respectful, productive and positive relationships, which will improve retention in the long run.
For more information about Insights Discovery and our workshops, head to www.realityhr.co.uk/insights-discovery.
To learn more about other ways you can attract and retain talent, download our free recruitment and retention guide.