Whether you are an independent self-starter, a collaborative team player, etc., your work personality will help you reach the top of your game.
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you navigate the workplace or make the right decisions for business success. It’ll also offer you insights into interacting with colleagues, managing projects, and presenting yourself in the best possible way.
With the right mindset, your work personality can be a powerful tool for ensuring career and business success. Read on to learn more.
What Is Work Personality?
Work personality is the trait that makes you unique in your professional roles. It is often used interchangeably with terms like work style and work preferences. The concept of work personality is common in business and career coaching.
Your work personality will help you to understand your specific strengths and weaknesses. These inform your job search and help you decide on the right job or career path.
Knowing your work personality will also help you to manage your relationships with colleagues and partners. If you manage a team and understand their work personalities, it'll be easier to get the most out of their strengths.
Tips to Help You Know Your Work Personality
It is best to have insights into your personality to improve areas that don’t align with your job responsibilities. Here are ways to know your work personality.
1. Take a Personality Assessment
To begin, you need to understand your personality in the workplace to perform better. Personality assessment is the best and most effective way to test your work personality. The personality test elicits information about your interests, preferences, motivations, emotional makeup, etc.
2. Ask for Honest Feedback from Friends
Your close friends or colleagues can give honest feedback about your work personality. That’s because they closely interact and observe your behavior.
Image taken from Strikingly User Website
3. Record Yourself
You can voice record yourself or take videos during presentations, meetings, etc. Self-observation will help you find your blind spots and learn about your strengths in different settings.
You need to understand your work personality and how it influences your work style and relationship with others. This way, you'll be able to use the insights to improve yourself.
What Are the Big Types of Work Personality Traits
Each person has a distinctive pattern of behaving, feeling, and thinking. All these depend on innate dispositions, lifelong experiences, and environmental factors.
A person's personality traits dictate how they behave over time instead of one instance. There are different types of work personalities, but this section lists the top five traits.
1. Agreeableness
This is one of modern psychology's famous work personality traits. You can see this trait in how someone interacts with others and approaches various activities.
People with high agreeableness tend to be cooperative, compassionate, and friendly. They usually understand other people's feelings and needs more and tend to be less competitive.
2. Extroversion
Extroversion is a work personality trait characterized by a person's tendency to be outgoing, assertive, and socially active. People see extroverts as confident and outgoing; they are usually more involved in leading conversations and taking charge of situations.
They are generally energized by social interactions and are first to volunteer for tasks or take the initiative to make decisions.
Image taken from Strikingly User Website
3. Conscientiousness
This is an individual's tendency to be organized, detail-oriented, and goal-oriented. People who possess this trait have a strong sense of responsibility and reliability and are hard-working and productive.
They are also more likely to follow through on tasks and finish them on time. Conscient people are also known to abide by workplace rules to the latter.
4. Openness to Experience
This work personality includes being inventive, creative, imaginative, open to nonconformity, unusual ideas, etc.
People with this trait are usually willing to tolerate extra ambiguity and are independent-minded. As a result, they quickly accept new beliefs and concepts at their workplaces.
5. Neuroticism
In basic terms, neuroticism is the tendency of an individual to experience negative emotions. They respond to stress or other situations in an emotionally unstable way.
People who are highly neurotic are usually more anxious, moody, emotionally reactive, and have difficulty dealing with stress.
At work, neuroticism can manifest itself in several ways. For instance, a highly neurotic individual may often be anxious and prone to worry.
They may find making decisions difficult and easily overwhelmed by tasks. They may also be more prone to negative emotions such as anger and frustration and may be quick to criticize others or themselves.
How Your Employee's Personality Affects Their Work Behaviors
There are various ways in which personality traits can affect the workstyle of your employees. Therefore, you need to understand your different employees' work personalities and how you can bring the best out of each personality.
1. Motivation
People are motivated by different factors, including money, recognition, etc. It can be challenging to figure out your employees' motivation independently if you're managing a team. Therefore, it's best to ask, and you can do this even in interviews.
Some individuals are solely motivated by money. To make them work harder, you can offer promises of a bonus or raise.
Others like recognition; you can celebrate their successes by sending them personalized recognition emails. Alternatively, you can praise them at staff luncheons. Lastly, some individuals are self-motivated and tend to work hard for the satisfaction they get after completing a project well.
2. Work Ethic
Employee work ethic refers to the level of commitment one has to work. High-performance employees usually have high work ethics and are incredibly valuable to businesses and teams. They are generally ambitious and disciplined, and you can rely on them to perform well and get the job done.
Image taken from Strikingly User Website
You can determine someone's work ethic by paying attention to their approach. Does your employee show up on time? Do they complete projects on time? You can also ask potential employees about their work ethic during the interview process.
Employees with high work ethics are best for teams developing new projects. They are also great for roles with additional responsibilities that involve making quick decisions—for example, managing a department or public relations position.
On the other hand, individuals with low work ethics often need more oversight and management to have them focused on work. This can be pretty strenuous if you're managing a large team.
3. Introvert or Extrovert
People vary in how outgoing they are. Extroverts work well in roles that allow them to interact with others.
Generally, extroverts can offer the best customer support and help boost other workers' attitudes. Extroverts can’t flourish in roles that have them behind closed doors and away from other people.
However, introverts like jobs that keep them from people as it helps preserve their energies. For example, they can do well in information technology jobs or as accountants. Give them jobs requiring little interaction with staff members or vendors.
4. Attention to Detail
This is an essential work personality trait because it helps to prevent costly mistakes and misunderstandings.
Individuals with great attention to detail aren't ideal for executing comprehensive plans. But if you give them a short-term project, they'll flawlessly execute it to the smallest detail.
Plus, they are usually so organized and keep excellent records that can help you recreate a particular project in the future. People with keen eyes for details work well in finance and accounting roles where details are essential.
Use the Strikingly Team Feature to Manage Your Business
Strikingly has a ton of features that you might not know all of them. The team is one powerful feature that can help you manage your business website efficiently.
This feature allows you to invite colleagues, friends, and employees to help manage your Strikingly website. After you’ve understood the work personalities of your employees or team, you can give them roles on your Strikingly website using “Team.”
You can invite or add up to ten teammates to each of your websites. Here are the steps on how to use the team feature.
1. Open your site editor and go to "Settings."
2. Click on "Team" and then "Add Teammate."
Image taken from Strikingly Product
3. Upload a profile picture (optional).
4. Enter your teammate's name and then your email.
Image taken from Strikingly Product
5. Select the ideal role for your teammate according to their capabilities (Each role offers a different level of access to your website).
6. Your teammate must accept your email invitation to access your website.
If they don't receive the invitation email, you can ask them to check their "Updates" or "Spam" folder. If they have a Strikingly account, all they need to do is log in.
But if they don't have a Strikingly account, they'll be asked to create one and set a password.
Immediately your teammate accepts your email invitation and logs in to Strikingly.com; your website will appear in their dashboard. From here, they can edit it depending on your roles.
Conclusion
Your work personality will help you to understand how to function well in the workplace. When you understand your strengths and weaknesses, making the right decisions is easy. You should also take time to understand your colleagues' work personalities. This way, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively and work more productively together.
