The goal of building the best organization is a top priority for leaders. How that result is achieved depends on who you ask. Should you use motivational techniques such as rewards? Should you craft a system of risk-avoidance policies to incentivize good behavior over bad. Or can you use assessments to find the right people for your team from the very start? With so many questions, and several answers we wanted to look at why assessments are a good tool for personnel development and how some of them work to connect people with higher levels of performance.

Employee Assessments Are a Great Way to Develop People

There are many ways assessments can benefit an organization yet regardless of the assessment, the aim is virtually always to create greater awareness about oneself and others. While the benefits may be unique to your particular organization, Effortless HR, an employee assessment company, provides an instructive list of reasons for seeking to integrate employee assessments into your hiring and training practices.

1. Reduce expensive and resource draining turnover
2. Address team development gaps
3. Refine hiring practices for a better job fit
4. Increase manager effectiveness
5. Improve workforce development
6. Raise productivity
7. Maximize sales effectiveness
8. Sharpen customer service
9. Amplify employee engagement
10. More effectively manage stress and conflict

With so many possible benefits, assessments would seem to be the first step to developing personnel. The challenge is often finding an assessment that is right for your objectives. While many assessments will do a good job of creating personal awareness, and can improve team effectiveness knowledge requires application in order for the assessment to become part of a new culture.

Consider These 3 Assessment Tools

Emotional Intelligence Skills Assessment (EISA)

With the rise in awareness about how important a role emotions play in personal and professional interaction many organizations are connecting soft-skills with hard results.

Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) is best defined as the ability to identify and manage emotional information in oneself and others and to focus energy on required behaviors. Also known as “social intelligence,” the skills and competencies that comprise EI complement a person’s cognitive and technical skills. The EISA is both a measure of emotional intelligence and a framework for understanding and improving emotional and social functioning.

The EISA provides a strong, fundamental assessment of emotional intelligence (EI) along with five core factors that can be developed to maximize emotional and social functioning. The EISA is designed to provide the participant with feedback on self-described and observer-rated frequency of emotionally and socially intelligent behaviors across five dimensions. The report provides information on the emotional and social factors that affect success at work. These five factors are

• Perceiving
• Managing
• Decision Making
• Achieving
• Influencing

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Whether your personality is born of situational responses or intrinsic values MBTI is a powerful way to understand how people are motivated by different stimuli.

The purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) personality inventory is to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people’s lives. The essence of the theory is much seemingly random variation in behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, due to basic differences in how individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment.

“Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills.”

In developing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [instrument], the aim of Isabel Briggs Myers, and her mother, Katharine Briggs, was to make the insights of type theory accessible to individuals and groups. They addressed the two related goals in the developments and application of the MBTI instrument: The identification of basic preferences of each of the four dichotomies specified or implicit in Jung’s theory.

DISC Behavioral Assessment Tool

The ability to interpret observed behavior has a distinct advantage when it comes to bringing about team improvement because all parties come to rely on specific and observable facts.

DISC is the universal language of observable human behavior, or “how we act”. DISC does not measure education, experience, values or intelligence. It simply measures an individual’s behaviors, or how they communicate. With the knowledge of DISC, you can learn to understand and appreciate your behavior style, and then adapt your style in communication with others. In fact, you can change the golden rule. Rather than treating others as you would want to be treated, you can treat others the way they want to be treated.

DISC assessment accurately measures four dimensions of behavior, which are each associated with a behavioral style:

1. How you respond to problems or challenges ⇒ Dominance
2. How you influence others to your point of view ⇒ Influence
3. How you respond to the pace of the environment ⇒ Steadiness
4. How you respond to rules and procedures ⇒ Compliance

The results of DISC assessments reveal an individual’s high and low placement in each of the four dimensions that make up their unique natural and adapted behavioral styles.

Put Your People First

When choosing an assessment, consider what you want to achieve. Do you want to connect people with stronger interpersonal skills? Are you seeking to build a better sales team through relationship building techniques? Whatever your desired outcome, assessments are a great way to lay a solid foundation. One that is shared by all parties as you begin to build a new team, or strengthen an seasoned group of professionals. What is key to making assessments work for your organization in the long term is a commitment to integrating the data you gain with your overall training strategy. While the 90’s saw a rise in the popularity of assessments, without deliberate integration into the culture, they end up becoming expensive surveys. By knowing that assessments are only one part of a multi-pronged approach to training you will ensure clear value for all team members.

DARE TO BE GREAT!
Your Solutions Vault Team