Why Assessing Employee Behavior is Good for Your Organization

Behavioral assessments identify the different ways employees behave at work. Once you identify behaviors you can work to reduce conflict within the organization and increase employees’ potential for success.

Behavioral assessments are designed to help employees understand their own individual behavioral style, motivators, and preferences. Once employees understand themselves, they can learn to recognize the styles, motivators, and preferences of others, and discover ways to adapt their own style to meet the needs of others.

This understanding of behavior can help organizations improve collaboration and reduce conflict, build more effective and productive teams, hire and retain top talent, develop effective coaches and managers, and increase sales and customer service success.

Understanding the behavioral style of your workforce allows you to develop performance-improvement strategies based on each employee’s strengths and weaknesses. Employees learn what drives themselves and others, how they behave under stress, and helps them value personal diversity. Behavioral assessments also provide a common language that helps professionals connect better with the people they work with.

There are several ways a company may assess the behavior of their employees. A manager may have an individual complete a behavioral style assessment and facilitate a one-on-one coaching session with them. Many organizations, however, have an internal facilitator present training programs that incorporate behavioral assessments. As an alternative, the organization may hire an outside consultant to deliver the behavioral assessments and training.

An organization should only select behavioral assessments that offer valid scores and accurate feedback to the respondent. The publisher should offer documentation that supports the validity and reliability of the assessment.

Some behavioral assessments come in a paper format that will require the respondent or the facilitator to score them by hand. Many behavioral assessments, however, are now available in an online format, which saves classroom time and ensure scoring accuracy. Online assessments are becoming more popular and may also offer the facilitator group report capability to further tailor their seminars.

Before administering assessments the facilitator or manager will want to put the respondents at ease and reduce anxiety by explaining why they’re completing the assessment and what will happen next. It’s important to stress to your respondents that behavioral assessments are not tests that someone passes or fails. There are no correct or incorrect answers, and no behavioral style is better than another.

Whether an organization wishes to reduce turnover, increase sales, or improve relationships between employees, assessing employee behavior can have a powerful impact. With proper planning and delivery, assessing employee behavior encourages positive relationships among peers, managers, vendors, and clients, which will help you build a strong and competitive organization.

Resources Unlimited is a leading provider of Inscape Publishing learning materials, best known for DiSC, a behavioral model and set of tools that have been used for over 35 years by more than 40 million people. Resources Unlimited offers DiSC Profiles, DiSC training seminars, live and virtual DiSC train-the-trainer certifications, consulting, and meeting facilitation.

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Mike Smith