Understanding your employees work style and personality traits can increase productivity and employee satisfaction and reduce turnover. According to a workplace survey, 67% of HR professionals are using personality tests and pre-employment testing to better understand potential hires. If you’re interested in implementing personality inventories or style assessments into your own hiring practices, here are the top assessment tools we’ve used and have been hearing about from practitioners to help you understand your employees and potential hires better:

  • DISC
  • The Big Five
  • Kolbe
  • StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths 2.0)
  • FourSight
  • Basadur Profile
  • Workplace Personality Inventory
  • Team Dimensions Profile
  • Golden Personality Profiler
  • Myers Briggs (MBTI)

Keep reading below to learn more about each of these personality assessments for employees. You can also view our article about innovation assessments where we highlight 7 tools like the innovation impact assessment. If you’ve taken multiple self-assessments, the self-assessment coach GPT can help you interpret, combine, and apply insights from various assessments, and create a personalized summary report for you with insights and a development plan.

Here are some of the more popular self-assessments for employees.

Personality Assessments for the Workplace

DISC

The DISC model was created by physiological psychologist Dr. William Marston in 1928 and has since been used to create personality assessments. DISC is composed of four areas:

  • Dominance: A person who places emphasis on getting results, challenge-accepting, confident
  • Influence: A person who places emphasis on influencing or persuading others, likes to collaborate, is optimistic
  • Steadiness: A person who places emphasis on cooperation and dependability, calm approach and manners, is supportive
  • Conscientiousness: A person who places emphasis on quality and accuracy, enjoys independence, prefers objective reasoning and facts

The Everything DISC Workplace Profile Assessment can help your staff better understand their priorities, strengths, and weaknesses. With this information, you can better collaborate and innovate with others and build more effective team relationships by playing to everyone’s strengths. Learn more about DISC workshops for your organization or team.

The Big Five

This personality assessment is based upon the “big five” characterization of personality traits:

  • Extraversion – talkative, energetic, assertive
  • Agreeableness – sympathetic, kind, affectionate
  • Conscientiousness – organized, thorough, planned
  • Neuroticism – tense, moody, anxious
  • Openness to Experience – imaginative, insightful

These five categories are broad enough to account for the range of traits that people use to describe themselves and others. The 300-item test is a comprehensive assessment using the Big Five model that can help you pinpoint tendencies of your employees and use that to better align with their job responsibilities and workplace style. Another simple way to get started in under 5 minutes is with this free big five personality test. If you’d like to go deeper you can learn more about Big Five Personality Workshops, Training, and Programs.

Kolbe

The 36-question Kolbe Index is another top personality assessment to use in the workplace. This Index focuses on identifying a person’s unique method of operation – their instinctive way of doing things. It works by narrowing in on the following four traits:

  • Fact finder: gathering and sharing of information
  • Follow thru: arranging and designing
  • Quick start: dealing with risk and uncertainty
  • Implementer: handling space and tangibles

By reviewing the ways in which your employees process and handle information and tasks, you can design better workflow in your organization and design teams primed to innovate together.

CliftonStrengths 2.0

Formerly called the Clifton StrengthsFinder, this assessment aims to help people identify what they naturally do best and how to further develop their greatest talents and skills. The CliftonStrengths exam sorts people based on four different domain areas:

  • Strategic thinking: how do you absorb, think about, and analyze information?
  • Executing: how do you make things happen?
  • Influencing: how do you influence others?
  • Relationship building: how do you build and nurture strong relationships?

From those four main buckets, they extrapolate further into 34 different traits and themes. This may provide useful insight into your employees thought processes, motivations, and workplace relationship behaviors.

FourSight

The FourSight Thinking Profile is centered around providing self-awareness to cultivate innovation and effective problem solving. Following similar themes as some of the other personality assessments on this list, FourSight breaks down your inherent nature under four main buckets:

  • Clarifier
  • Ideator
  • Developer
  • Implementer

Knowing how suited any given employee is for those four traits can help management place them in suitable roles during innovation projects and teamwork assignments.

Basadur

The Basadur Profile, available for both individuals and team purchasing, measures a person’s unique preferences during the four stages of the innovation process – generating, conceptualizing, optimizing, and implementing. By understanding more deeply how your employees learn, gather information, and create, you can help your team cycle more smoothly through the innovation process and develop sound solutions to challenges your organization faces.

While the founders behind the Basadur Profile do not consider it a personality assessment, it is a wonderful tool that can help individuals or teams better understand how to increase their creativity and innovative ideation.

Workplace Personality Inventory

The Workplace Personality Inventory Test (Version 2) measures 16 unique workplace styles based upon the database of the Department of Labor for key traits required in a wide range of jobs. Promising to help you find insights into leadership, initiative, and innovation, this personality assessment may be another good option for your organization. The test will identify predictors of traits such as flexibility, dependability, and attention to detail, so it may also serve as a valuable tool during the hiring process to better understand potential hires or new recruits.

Team Dimensions Profile

Team Dimensions 2.0 determines a person’s preferences for roles within a team. This can help better align people with work that they will enjoy, want to perform, and excel at. It can also make it easier to form innovation sprints set up with the right people in the correct roles for their interests and skill set. The basic roles studied in this exam include:

  • Creator – generates original concepts, sees the big picture
  • Advancer – develops ways to promote ideas, moves forward with implementation
  • Refiner – challenges and analyzes ideas to detect potential problems
  • Executor – lays the groundwork for implementation, manages the details

Using the “Z Process” to map the flow of assigning roles and completing tasks, this assessment can help teams move forward quickly through the innovation process.

Golden Personality Profiler

Administered by schools and organizations worldwide, the Golden Personality Type Profiler is powered by both Jung’s Theory of Type as well as the Five Factor model of personality. This test will ask questions related to the five areas:

  • Extraversion vs introversion – where you focus your energy
  • Sensing vs intuition – how you gather information
  • Thinking vs feeling – how you make decisions
  • Organizing vs adapting – how you approach life
  • Tense vs calm – how you respond to stress

This is all valuable information an organization can use to design better team projects, meetings, and workspaces.

Myers Briggs

Myers Briggs is a classic personality assessment designed based on C. G. Jung’s theory on psychological types. It identifies based on 16 unique personality types that result from the different interactions of 4 main traits:

  • Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)
  • Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)
  • Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
  • Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

You can learn more about each of the sixteen personality types here.

Using Personality Assessment in the Workplace

Personality assessments can be used in the workplace in a variety of ways, including:

  1. Recruitment and selection: Personality assessments can help organizations identify candidates who are a good fit for the company culture and the specific role they are hiring for.
  2. Performance evaluations: Personality assessments can provide insights into an individual’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas for development, which can be useful for performance evaluations and goal setting.
  3. Team building: Personality assessments can help team members understand one another’s communication and work styles, leading to better collaboration and increased team effectiveness.
  4. Leadership development: Personality assessments can help leaders understand their own communication and leadership styles, as well as the styles of their team members, leading to more effective leadership and management.
  5. Career development: Personality assessments can provide individuals with insights into their own strengths and areas for development, which can be useful for career planning and development.

It’s important to note that personality assessments should be used in conjunction with other tools and techniques, and should not be the sole basis for decisions related to recruitment, promotion, or other personnel matters.

Personality Assessments for Employees Conclusion

These personality assessments for the workplace can help you better understand your employees and build better innovation sessions because of it. Find more design thinking and innovation resources on our blog.

Contact us today for help applying personality, work style, innovation tests, or other assessments for leadership development an innovation at your organization. We also specialize in designing or facilitating leadership development workshops, events or even a conference at your organization.