What Is A Behavioural Assessment And How Does It Benefit My Business?
Assessments can be used to measure many different traits, competencies, and characteristics in your employees, including behaviours, communication styles, emotional intelligence, motivating factors, sales competencies, and more. Each assessment gives you useful insights into different areas that individuals can focus on developing, or that your managers can use to tailor personal development plans (PDPs) for their reports. In this article, we look at how behavioural assessments are used in the workplace and how they can benefit your business.
What Is A Behavioural Assessment?
Behavioural assessments are systematic evaluations of our actions, reactions, perspectives, etc... which are used to predict our behaviours in specific situations, measured against different psychological attributes like, for example, intelligence. Whilst roles and colleagues can influence how employees behave, the assessment tool measures their behaviours against their role. Behavioural assessments give managers insight into how or why an individual behaves. For example, an extroverted person may perform better in a sales role than a compliance role...this doesn't necessarily mean being extroverted in a compliance role is a negative thing.
Types Of Work Behavioural Assessment
Several different types of assessments exist depending on what employers want to learn more about. Some, for instance, focus on workplace traits such as communication style, leadership, teamwork, adaptability, motivation, and problem-solving, while others identify patterns in behavioural tendencies, such as how an individual may behave in specific scenarios, and how they collaborate or resolve conflicts. Others deliver insights into an individual’s behaviour and are often linked to established behavioural frameworks such as DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) or the ‘Big Five’ (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism).
TTI Success Insights Assessment Tools: How Do They Work?
At Penguin, we have access to a psychometric suite of various reports developed by TTI Success Insights, a global business that specialises in behavioural and work-based talent assessments.
When completing an assessment, the individual will be met with a multiple-choice questionnaire that will ask them a series of questions for specific situations (work and non-work related) and ask them to rank a series of responses from 'most like me' to 'least like me'. For example:
Rank the sets of words from the set MOST (top) like your behaviour to the set LEAST (bottom) like your behaviour:
Enthusiastic
Contented, satisfied
Positive, confident
Peaceful, tranquil
Based on the responses provided, the assessment will calculate the answers given against the metric the tool is measuring, e.g. behaviours, emotional intelligence, etc., and will then provide a written report with infographics to clearly demonstrate the result.
DISC
One of our most popular and requested assessments, the DISC behavioural assessment, measures how a person communicates and behaves in the workplace. This uses four behavioural traits for assessment:
Dominance, or how a person approaches challenges and problems
Influence, which describes how the individual influences others and interacts with his or her colleagues
Steadiness, which measures how someone responds to consistency and pace
Compliance, which is how we respond to procedures & constraints that are not our own
Driving Forces
Another assessment analyses the driving forces or motivators behind a person’s actions, measuring 12 driving forces grouped into 6 primary motivators (knowledge, utility, surroundings, others (e.g the desire to help or serve others), power, and methodologies (the preference for structures and systems)).
Taken together, the assessments provide crucial insight into the factors that energise and inspire an individual in the workplace and the likely behavioural consequences of these motivators. Through a series of questions, candidates and employers can learn where further actions (e.g. learning or training) might be required to improve strengths or any areas in need of development. It is important to highlight that our behaviour is not determined by our motivators. For example, low performance may happen when an employee is feeling demotivated because his motivators are not being met.
What next?
Penguin Learning is one of only a few training partners in the UK with access to TTI Success Insight’s psychometric suite, making us one of the country’s leading providers of behavioural assessment tools, which can be used for recruitment, team building, personal development, coaching, etc... To discover the benefits for your business, please contact one of our specialists today by clicking here.
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