I call myself the people whisperer for business because I spend time working with organizations on how they can understand their employees. We need to do this in order to put the right employee in the role best suited for them.
How do I know what an employee is good at?
I use psychometric and cognitive assessments. These employee assessments measure the four primary drivers of a person, which I refer to as brain wiring, and it provides about 22 data points.
The assessment I use is from The Predictive Index®. The science behind The Predictive Index® has been around for over 65 years and is specifically designed to predict a person’s behavior at work.
The Society for Human Resource Management wrote a great article on this: “Predictive Assessments Give Companies Insight into Candidates’ Potential.”
In the article, they state, “The data supports the growing appeal of assessments. According to the Talent Board’s 2016 Candidate Experience Research report, 82 percent of companies are using some form of pre-employment assessment test, and how they use assessments is evolving. Two types of popular screens are job simulations (54 percent of respondents are using these, according to the Talent Board study) and culture fit (51 percent using, a 22 percent increase from the Board’s 2014 study.) While assessments once primarily were used for executive and mid-level leadership positions, today they’re commonly used for hourly and entry-level jobs.”
These employee assessments can tell you if an employee does the following:
- Acts with a sense of urgency
- Likes to follow the rules
- Connects fast with people and wants to influence others
- Their level of autonomy
This allows me to put round pegs into round peg roles and square pegs into square peg roles.
For existing employees, it allows me to resolve conflict between team members and allow teams to understand each other better.
How do I leverage assessment data?
Ultimately, the goal is to increase the effectiveness of workplace interactions.
Let’s dig a little bit deeper into the science behind this. When we measure an employee’s drives, then we understand their needs.
When their needs are met, then we have happy engaged employees. However, when needs are not met, then we have disengaged employees.
Having this employee assessment information is a huge advantage, but it is not all that you need to understand a person. We need to know their skills, their interests, and their values.
If you’d like to know more about behavioral and cognitive assessments, I would be delighted to have you try a PI Assessment complimentary, just click here.
You too can be a People Whisperer!
If you are already using an assessment, what kind of key insights helped from the assessment helped you with your employees?
I’d love to hear your stories in the comments down below.
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