Managing productivity is something of a dark art when it comes to business growth. Whether a new business or a well-established one, much of your effectiveness depends on the motivation and productivity of your core staff.
There are many specific ways to inspire productivity in your team, from embracing flexible and hybrid working to providing amenities and perks in the office. But there is an understated element to productivity that could be starving progress without your knowledge: personality. Addressing the character traits of your team can make for a warmer, more communicative office – but how might you start such an endeavour?
Identifying Traits in Your Team
Understanding the personal qualities of your team is not necessarily a convoluted exercise. Many of us get the measure of our colleagues simply through interacting with them on a day-to-day basis. There are also non-verbal clues you can pick up through their preferred methods of work or delivery, and their performance in group settings.
For a more formal approach to understanding the ‘types’ of character in your office or department, you could incorporate a personality test or questionnaire as part of a team-building exercise. By formalising what is essentially a qualitative, subjective understanding of personality and self through a single, central test, you could better understand how to play to the strengths of your staff.
This approach would necessarily be optional, as some staff members may rightly have concerns over the professional implications of any given results – but as a loose, overarching, and non-committal approach to people management, it can be a useful way for new managers to approach office dynamics.
Recognising Personal Strengths
Naturally, personal traits and characteristics can have an overwhelming impact on professional conduct and productivity; management and staff alike take note of personal strengths and weaknesses throughout the working day, with implications both positive and negative for work.
Poster and flyer merchants instantprint surveyed this effect, finding out which personality traits are most appreciated in a colleague by the working population. The survey found that patience and communication ranked particularly highly as desirable, with 46% and 45% of workers respectively highlighting the trait as professionally positive. Problem-solving (43%) ranked similarly highly, with organisational qualities (35%) and creativity (35%) not far behind.
The survey also identified less-positive traits, in the form of domineering or inflexible personalities. But, rather than focusing on the negative aspects of a given personality, there are ways in which you as a manager can better place employees to work to their strengths.
Weaponising Change
One of the key ways to do this is to re-arrange your physical working environment to better suit the characteristics of your team. Clashing personalities sitting close to one another, despite the relative distance between their roles or departments, can create an invisible bottleneck in your office dynamic. Meanwhile, placing confluent personalities together can create a convivial working environment.
Regular change-ups to office layout and team structure can also help your team develop better interpersonal relationships, and hence cohere concerning whole-office projects. Rather than accounting for poor social skills in certain staff members, you can have an active hand in ironing them out for the betterment of the office.