As a business owner it is only natural for you to build your workforce as best as possible and find efficiencies that can help in making your company more successful. For these reasons, more companies are turning to the Predictive Index (PI).
This tool refers to a self-report assessment that uses a free-choice response format whereby an individual employee is provided with a list of adjectives. The person is required to select the adjectives that they find to be more descriptive of his/her behavior and those that they feel descriptive of the expectations of other people regarding his/her behavior. PI surveys aim at measuring four primary personality constructs: dominance, extroversion, patience, and formality.
The PI survey is useful in the workplace by helping in a variety of different ways.
1. Helps in assessing employee attitudes
The attitude of employees is crucial to the success of your business. With a positive attitude, a worker can establish a good relationship with customers and the employer, and this will allow the business to be more successful. An employee’s good attitude will not only attract more clients but also retain them for business needs in the future. Therefore, business owners and managers need a tool to evaluate the attitude and behaviour of their employee. In this respect, the PI assessment is required.
The Predictive Index test will help you judge the attitudes and work ethic of your employees. With this tool in place, you as a manager or business owner will be able to objectify the way each of your employees think and feel towards work, customers, their colleagues and you. This will result in you being able to sort out the positive employees from the negative ones and potentially terminate the latter group before they start to impact the business in a bad way.
2. Allocating work
It is common for an employee to excel in one area and struggle in another. These struggles can negatively impact the business as it may cause a project to not meet standards of quality or a client may not be serviced in a way that makes them feel appreciated. Therefore, the manager or business owner needs to carry out the PI assessment on each of his/her employees.
With the assessment, you will be able to understand each of your employees and identify their individual energy and motivations towards different tasks. Consequently, you will know how to allocate duties to each person on your team. Through this, you will be able to give everyone work that allows them to build on their skills and maximize their full potential.
3. Facilitates staff cooperation
As a manager or business owner, a main goal of yours is for all employees to work in harmony to reach specific and attainable goals. Even if you think this is happening, things may happen behind the scenes or employees may be harbouring resentment towards one another. If this occurs, you need to identify the problem and sort it out as soon as possible.
The PI assessment will assist you in predicting behavioural patterns of your staff and learn if something is amiss. Knowing this will help you be proactive instead of reactive and contain the situation before things become uncontrollable and negatively impact the company overall.
4. Employing the best candidates
Though skill are primarily used as the guideline for identifying the best candidate for a particular position,attitude and behaviour are equally important. A candidate may be adequately skilled and presumably fit for a role, but a negative attitude will negate these factors as it has the potential to affect the environment at and the work completed by your company.
The PI assessment should be a staple process when you are looking to fill a vacant position at your company. It will help you streamline the hiring and ensure that you employ the right candidate.
