Personality Type in the Workplace Blog

Whatever sector you work in, there's a fair chance that short-term contract or "gig" work is a key feature of your current and future workforce. More and more people are choosing to work independently in order to gain better control over their lives and there are advantages for employers too, in terms of managing workforce capacity without long-term commitment. Today, around a third of workers use contract or freelance gigs as their primary source of... Read more

As trainers and managers, we often talk about improving teamwork in a business, but what does that actually mean? How do you measure teamwork? And is that something you should even be doing to keep track of what's going on at your business?

One approach is to measure the team's output such as hours billed, units sold, number of tickets answered, repeat customers, or whether the team completes a project on time and under budget. It's easy to... Read more

Losing even one employee can be a huge loss to your business. Not only do you lose a valuable pair of hands, you potentially lose a chunk of experience that’s difficult to replace. Productivity declines, and morale may take a hit across the wider workforce, especially if you are left understaffed. These factors can have devastating effects on everything from leadership to service quality and of course, the bottom line.

Still, what can you do to... Read more

Do you want to warm-up your employees for a morning’s team building or personality workshop event? Then be sure to include some fun-and-inclusive ice breakers. Done properly, they are a terrific way to get people interested in the activity and relax before getting to the nitty-gritty of personality theory. They are also helpful for getting people to come to the party dressed as themselves and demonstrate the value of the Briggs and Myers framework to... Read more

No matter what you do for a living, or how well organized and managed your workplace is, at some point, your employees will feel stressed. That's not necessarily a bad thing. A little stress can help us stay energetic, focused, and able to meet new challenges in the workplace. It's only when stress exceeds a person's ability to cope that it becomes a problem.

Often, managers look at stress as an office-wide problem and seek to implement global... Read more

Collaboration is no longer a nice-to-have, it's an organizational structure that defines our work environments. Whether we're talking about cross-functional teams, silos breaking down, virtual meeting rooms, huddles, stand-ups, or the myriad technologies that boost teamwork, collaboration has never been more essential to operations. The team - not the individual - is the secret to business success. 

But sometimes, despite your best intentions,... Read more

There are two types of employees: those who thrive in a team environment, and those who would rather work alone. Though these two groups can work together cohesively when they need to, they typically accomplish much more when allowed to do things their own way.

In most business environments, the independent-minded person who works better alone has good reason for doing so. Usually, those reasons relate to his or her personality type—the 'lone... Read more

To improve future performance, teams must learn from their mistakes. Despite being an irrefutable truth, few teams do this well. This is not due to a lack of willingness on their part - most organizations devote countless hours to after-action reviews, project postmortems and similar analysis to help the team reflect on what it did wrong and avoid similar mistakes in the future. More often than not, these actions fail to drive any real change in future... Read more

One of the most challenging work transitions comes when you face the prospect of leading a new team for the first time. Getting people to work together is not easy, and many team leaders rush over the basics in order to start achieving goals. But the first weeks and months are critical for starting a team off on the right foot. What actions should you take to set the team up for success? How will you get the team working well together, manage conflict... Read more