Everyone has their preferred style of working. Some people are hyper-detail-oriented, while some prefer to focus on the big picture. Some make great team members while others thrive in versatile support roles. A diverse and flexible team is great for innovation and productivity, as everyone can focus on doing what they do best to get the job done.
However, placing individual roles where they can be successful is much easier when you understand the work styles of your team members. That’s where a work style assessment can help. These assessments can give team leaders insight into the strengths and weaknesses of their team, so they can structure the team in a way that drives success and positive outcomes. This also helps with employee satisfaction, as they’re placed in a position to win and allowed to work the way they prefer. In today’s article, we’ll dive deeper into work style assessments, discuss their benefits and limitations and tell you how Worklytics can give you the data to make the most of these assessments. Let’s get started.
Work style assessments have become increasingly sophisticated and advanced over the years. With a simple test, you can get a pretty decent idea of how someone works and how they respond to work scenarios. In short, you can determine the best possible roles and work environments for team members based on what you find. While there are some limitations to this, it’s a good baseline for understanding your employees.
The modern work style assessment places individuals into four different categories – logical, detail-oriented, supportive and idea-oriented. Let’s take a brief look at each work style type:
Work style assessments benefit both the employer and the employee. For employees, it can help them understand how they work best, leading to personal and professional development. Here are some of the main benefits for employees:
One of the biggest benefits of taking this assessment is learning your strengths. It can help you understand how you can thrive in the workplace, what motivates you and where you should direct your energy. This can help you be more effective and make work more enjoyable. Of course, capitalizing on your strengths also means you can leverage your skills for promotions and professional development.
While learning about your strengths is great, it’s also important to know your weaknesses. Confronting our weaknesses isn’t always fun, but if you can learn them and improve them you can become a better worker overall. Understanding where you may not be as effective can also help you work with people whose strengths are your weaknesses, leading to a better and more well-rounded team.
Understanding how your work can help you adapt your workflows to your advantage. Adapting your workflows to your preferred work style not only makes you more efficient but can also make work less stressful. In short, aligning your work habits with your work style can make work a more productive and fulfilling experience.
Employers also benefit from these assessments. What team leader wouldn’t want to know how their team works best? With this knowledge, employers can pair the right teammates for projects and create a more supportive, collaborative and productive work environment for everyone. Some of the biggest benefits for employers include:
First and foremost, work style assessments help employers understand their team better. Workplaces are made up of diverse personalities, skills and work preferences, and it can be difficult to understand how these all fit together without the right data. Understanding how team members prefer to work can help you assign projects to the right people, pair work styles that work best together and make the work environment more enjoyable for your employees. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Once you understand how your team works best, you can adjust their workflows and processes. For instance, if you have a big project that requires a heavily data-oriented approach, you can assign multiple logical team members to the project along with a detail-oriented team member to keep them on track. Or, if you’re trying to find an innovative new way to market your product, you can pair some supportive team members with your idea-oriented team members.
Of course, when everyone is happy and working the way they prefer, you’ll see employees be more engaged with their jobs. Engagement directly ties into productivity, so you’ll see a more productive workforce too. This also means benefits like lower turnover, since engaged and happy employees are more likely to stay on board.
No system is perfect, and work style assessments are no different. While these assessments can give you a great overall understanding of how your team prefers to work, it’s more of a baseline, broad label than a definitive picture of an employee. People are multifaceted, and can’t really be placed into four categories in any kind of assessment. Putting too much importance on these assessments may cause you to pigeonhole employees and stifle their opportunities to grow in their skill sets.
For instance, a logical employee can have innovative ideas just like idea-oriented employees. Generally, if you conduct work style assessments with your team, make sure they’re looped into the process. Before enacting plans based on the results, talk to team members to get their perspective. One-on-ones can help provide a more well-rounded picture than you could get from this assessment alone. In short, it can be useful to use these types of assessments as a starting point, but they shouldn’t be an end-all-be-all way to define an employee.
To make the most of these assessments, it’s a good idea to combine them with other workplace metrics and data. Looking at these assessments alongside metrics like performance data, employee feedback and employee engagement can give you a more holistic picture of your team and how they work.
Ultimately, the goal of work style assessments is to provide data and insights to improve the workplace for employees, increase productivity and make your team as efficient and effective as possible. For that, you need the best data possible. That’s where Worklytics can help. Worklytics is a comprehensive workplace analytics platform that collects and anonymizes real-time data to give you actionable ways to improve the workplace. Try Worklytics today to see how it can help you make better, data-driven decisions.
