How Behavioural Styles Affect Workplace Performance

What Kind of Tree Are You?

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Or, if you were a colour, do you think you'd be red? Maybe blue, yellow or green? Weird questions? Not to Human Resources (HR) professionals. These are exactly the kinds of questions they might ask to determine the "type" of behavioural style you have as an employee.

Personnel "typing" is being used progressively in the current workplace climate of company downsizing, especially when staff retraining is considered. And that's because the worst thing a company can do is retrain the wrong people for the right jobs.

Hiring and (re) training employees is necessary, but can be expensive. Companies need to make sure their training dollars are maximized and not being wasted. Not everyone is suited for every job. An introvert wouldn't do very well in a job that required interacting with people. An extravert, on the other hand, would find it stifling working in a cubicle with only a computer screen to talk to. HR professionals can use employee "typing" to put together a training schedule that will best use that person's strengths.

The closer you can match a person's behavioural style to that of a particular job, the greater the chance the applicant will have to be successful long term. "Typing" is a training investment that assures happier employees who are less likely to leave in the short term. It's an investment that saves companies valuable training dollars in the long run.

But how do you know you're training the people you should be training? That's also where HR "typing" and behavioural tools come into play. They can assess what an individual's natural behavioural style is most likely to be. Is the employee very sociable; does s/he get along well with others? Does s/he like to take chances and charge ahead? Is staff cautious, tending to take the more travelled path? Are they good with numbers and crunching data? Do they work well on their own or perform better in a group setting?

Organizations have used behavioural assessment tools, in one form or another, for years. Headhunters have always used them in hiring top-level management. It's only recently that "typing" is considered cost-effective for use on entry-level positions. HR "typing" is not an exact science, though, and should not be the only means of assessing an applicant. But it is a useful method and only one HR tool for determining the working style of employees.

Another effective HR tool is a relatively new program that I have used successfully. "DiSC ® Dimensions of Behaviour"-the PPS2800 Series, distributed by Inscape Publishing -is easy to administer and you don't need a PhD. to interpret the results.

Understanding behaviour and how it affects performance is crucial to workplace success. If you learned how to recognize the behavioural style of others, you would then understand how certain people liked to manage or be managed, how they liked to send and receive information. Think of the possibilities. Think of how much easier our personal and professional lives would be if we knew what kind of trees we were, and then acted accordingly.

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