Personality Type in the Workplace Blog

Picture this: you walk into the office one morning and there's already a heated conversation going on. Brandon is berating Donna for not responding to his emails and causing him to miss an important deadline. Donna is furious with Brandon because she thinks his criticism is unfair – she has been snowed under with other commitments and helping Brandon did not feature highly on her list of priorities. She's upset that he's shouting at her in such an insensitive way.

Take care if you think that Feelers are the peacekeepers of the workplace. While they certainly strive to maintain harmony and appear caring and tactful, the fact is: Feelers communicate differently than Thinkers and this can be to their own detriment. Feelers tend to argue less, apologize more, and personalize each and every experience – all of which can undermine the team's success.

Here are five ways that Feelers unwittingly sabotage communication in the workplace – and some tips on what you, as a boss, can do about it.

Birds of a feather flock together, as the aphorism goes, and it's just as true for humans as it is for groups of animals in the wild. We all have a tendency to associate with people of similar personality to ourselves based on our shared attributes. This can affect our social networks. To cut a long story short, most of us have a stable network of contacts who look a lot like ourselves. What we're lacking are challengers, opinion leaders and mentors that can add a little salt to the soup.

To help your employees stay on track and to keep them engaged and productive, you'll need to set some metrics or milestones that you can measure and work towards. Most companies hand out performance goals at the annual performance review. Properly considered, they can help employees improve performance and job satisfaction. 

Leaders have the most challenging of jobs: leading a team of diverse employees to get behind a single vision and work collaboratively to achieve a common goal.

Not all leaders can do this effectively however.

Why do some leaders succeed while others fail?

As much as I like to sing the praises of the 9-to-5, the fact is, these hours are pretty much obsolete these days. From checking emails on weekends and phones keeping us on call 24/7 to the relentless rise of technology that lets workers access work at anytime from anywhere, the reality is, we're all working much longer hours than a decade ago.

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 income, and this number is expected to grow to 43 percent by the year 2020.

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 track these actions since they're concrete, and you can judge at a glance the team's improvement over baseline performance.

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 keep employees?