Maximizing Employee Success

Looking for the best tool to assess your team? Or are you wanting to improve yourself by learning what your strengths and weaknesses are? Are you hoping to synthesize your personality into a specific type? Or are you looking for a list of traits that make up your unique identity? And can an assessment be used to predict behavior?

These are valuable questions to ask before determining what professional development solution might be best for you and the people you work with. And with so many assessments on the market, it might be difficult to understand the benefits of all of them, let alone which one is right for your circumstance.

This article aims to start the exploration process on assessments, what they can do, and how you can use them. This will be the first in a series about this subject, but for this article, we’re going to cover these basic points:

• What exactly assessments are
• Types of assessments
• Benefits of using assessments in the workplace
• How to choose which assessment is right for you

What are Professional Assessments?

Professional assessments are objective tools used to evaluate an individual’s abilities, skills, and personality traits. Employers and employees use assessments to participate in a process of shared discovery related to an individuals’ unique strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. This process can lead an individual to a deeper understanding of themselves and can allow teams to strengthen their bonds and communicate more effectively.

Using professional assessments in the workplace can help employers identify the most suitable candidates for a job role, create development plans to improve employee performance, and focus training efforts on areas where employees need improvement. Overall, professional assessments can lead to improved job performance and greater success for organizations.

Types of Assessments

We have an adage: if you can do something, there’s probably an assessment for it. But what assessments will be valuable to you? How can they be useful to you and your team? And how many are out there? And which ones should you avoid?

There’s no right way to answer this question, but there are a few categories of assessments that might aid in your selection of an assessment that’s right for you.

Cognitive

First, there’s the cognitive assessment. Think your IQ Test or any test that measures things like your mental acuity like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) or the Weschler Intelligence Scale of Children® (WISC). These assessments are focused on functions like memory, attention span, coordination, and perception. Generally, they assess your ability to process information.

There is a time and a place for cognitive assessments. In medical or psychological context, cognitive assessments are used often, and for good reason. Sometimes the results of a cognitive assessment is the key to a diagnosis. Schools also use cognitive assessments to determine grade and class placement for students.

As for their place in a work setting, cognitive assessments might not be the best way to assess your team. In addition to their inability to assess leadership intangibles and skills, cognitive assessment usage in the workplace poses an interesting ethical question about the value of traditional “intelligence.” The value that this type of assessment has in a workplace is likely not going to help you achieve any of the goals that you have for hiring, development, or training. 

Behavioral

Next, the behavioral assessment. Think the DiSC® Profile or Kolbe A Index or the Resilience Condition output of the Resilience Innovator® Type Assessment. Behavioral assessments focus on actions and behaviors that you are likely to take based on certain stimuli or, in some cases, your innate instincts or unique style of working.

Many workplaces use behavioral assessments to understand the motivations of their employees, both intrinsic and extrinsic, in order to determine or predict how those motivations influence behavior. Using a behavioral assessment with your team is a great way to deepen your understanding of each other and enhance your communication.

The only downside to using a behavioral assessment is that they’re not always 100% accurate for every given situation. Of course, this could be said about most assessments, behavioral or otherwise. But motivations change throughout the course of a person’s life, and because of that, the results of your behavioral assessment that you took five years ago might not be the same as the results of one now. This isn’t a bad thing! It just means that you’ve got to be careful about how much stock you put into a behavioral assessment relative to when you take it.

Affective

The affective assessment is next up on our list. Think the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®)  or CliftonStrengths® (formerly Clifton StrengthFinders®) or the typological output of the Resilience Innovator® Type Assessment. These assessments are focused on measuring personality traits that highlight your strengths, weaknesses, and preferences.

Like behavioral assessments, many workplaces use affective assessments to measure workers. Often, these assessments are interested in understanding more about an individual’s tendencies and preferences related to emotional intelligence, information gathering, and relationship building. Using affective assessments with your team is a great way to deepen your understanding of one another and enhance your team-building skills.

An important note about affective assessments is that they are often heavily backed by research. On one hand, this further legitimizes affective assessments as useful and accurate. On the other hand, the research-heavy nature of affective assessments can make some outputs difficult to interpret. This nature also means that affective assessments can be quite costly.

Other

The “other” category of assessments is as broad as the title suggests. These assessments can range from something like the Enneagram to your average Buzzfeed quiz. The important thing to remember about assessments in this category (and assessments in general) is that there’s likely a time and a place for just about any assessment. Their use to you, however, is the variable factor, and it’s important to do your research before you choose an assessment for your team.

Benefits of Using Assessments in the Workplace

Assessments certainly have a place in the professional world. It’s possible, in fact, that you’ve taken your fair share of assessments at work. Interestingly, the vast majority of assessments discussed so far are individual assessments. So how can workplaces utilize assessments to build their teams? Let’s explore three different areas of the workplace where using individual assessments can strengthen your team.

Hiring

Though relatively uncommon these days because of ethical concerns, some workplaces still utilize assessments during the hiring process. In doing so, employers can make more informed decisions about which candidates are the most suitable for a job role. Assessments provide an objective evaluation of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, which can be used to predict their future job performance.

On one hand, using professional assessments can help organizations avoid the risk of making biased hiring decisions based on subjective factors like first impressions or personal preferences. These assessments are designed to minimize the impact of personal biases and focus solely on the candidate’s relevant skills and abilities.

On the other hand, using professional assessments during the hiring process can unfairly exclude candidates by implying that a certain “type” of candidate is more desirable than the other. If you want to use an assessment during the hiring process, use it only as an additional measure to gather more data, not as a tool that will make or break a candidate’s hireability.

Development

An area where it’s common to use assessments in the workplace is in professional development. By using professional assessments, employers can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their employees and develop plans to improve their job performance.

Professional assessments give both employers and employees the ability to objectively measure their strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and motivations related to their life in and outside of work. By analyzing the output of the assessment, employers can identify the areas where their employees need development, and create a customized development plan to improve their skills and job performance. This can help employees achieve their full potential and contribute to the success of the organization.

For the employee, assessments can grow self-awareness and deepen self-understanding. This feedback can be used to guide career development discussions and help employees plan their professional growth internally and externally as it relates to the organization for which they work. Using assessments to help the individual grow can easily be translated into helping the team grow, especially when done intentionally through training.

Training

The final area to explore is training. Professional assessments can be a valuable tool that employers can use to identify specific areas where their employees need training.

By using professional assessments, employers can focus their training efforts on the areas where employees need the most improvement. This can help ensure that employees have the necessary skills and knowledge to perform their job to the best of their ability and contribute to the success of the organization. Additionally, training like this contributes to the overall success of teams. Receiving equal training strengthens a team’s ability to communicate effectively and operate from a place of shared knowledge.

Furthermore, professional assessments can help employers measure the effectiveness of their training programs by evaluating employees’ performance before and after the training. This can help organizations adjust their training programs to ensure they are delivering the desired results.

When to Use Certain Assessments Over Others

As covered in the section “Types of Assessments,” any assessment can be of value to you. It just depends on your goals and aspirations related either to yourself, your team, your organization, or any combination of those entities. Generally speaking, here are some things to consider when trying to choose which assessment might be right for you, your team, and/or your organization:

What are you trying to find out? 

If you’re trying to understand what motivates you or your team, a behavioral assessment is probably your best bet, and one focused specifically on motivations (e.g. Motivational Maps®) might be the perfect assessment for you. If you’re trying to measure the emotional intelligence of your team, an affective assessment might be better suited for your needs. Which affective assessment, though, will be determined by why you want to measure emotional intelligence in the first place.

How often are you going to use the assessment?

A common misconception about assessments is that they’re all designed to be used exactly once. And some are! That’s likely where the misconception comes from. But some are not. In fact, some are designed to measure results over time, so taking the same assessment every six months, for example, might be the best way to use it.

If you’re looking for a one-and-done style of assessment, it’s likely that your MBTI® and DiSC® results won’t change after you take them once. If you want a tool that measures traits and preferences that are malleable over time, something like the Resilience Innovator® Type Assessment, which measures traits that are meant to be developed, might be what you’re looking for.

Take results with a grain of salt

After so much information on assessments, it might seem odd to give this advice, wholesale. Assessments are a valuable tool, but that’s all they are: a tool. No assessment can tell you everything about the individual who takes it. Assessments should always be something that can help you or challenge you for the better. Use them as an aid in your hiring, development, or training processes, not as prescriptions for the problem that you sought the assessment for in the first place.

What’s Next?

Using assessments can be transformative for you and your workplace when used appropriately and intentionally. To help aid you in your process to choose the right assessment for you, the next article will be a deep dive into behavioral assessments.

This article was written by Nia D’Emilio, Learning & Events Coordinator for Epicenter Innovation. This article is part of a larger series about professional assessments, their benefits, and their use cases.