How To Cultivate Culture With Soft Skills Assessments

If you read the New York Times, you may have seen a recent article titled “The $2 Billion Question of Who You Are at Work” by Emma Goldberg. The piece touches on the new post-pandemic, hybrid work environment and how companies are increasingly reliant on personality assessments to measure how employees think and feel — and how individuals might fit into this new world.

It caught my eye because Medix began using personality assessments to, for one, gauge how we can best pair employees with teams, and we’ve done this since before COVID changed the way we work. But in this new world, the relevance of this method has never been greater. That’s why I dedicated part of Chapter 1 of my book, Culture through Crisis: One Team’s Commitment to Winning with Purpose, to discuss how we use personality assessments with our own people as well as with prospective talent.

Talentoday & MyPrint

In 2018, Medix acquired Talentoday, a software company with an advanced people analytics platform. Its soft skills assessment, MyPrint, has helped with everything from increasing employee retention to revealing human potential and helping people truly achieve fulfillment. We want our people to feel seen and heard, for their desires to be acknowledged, and for their talents to be utilized appropriately.

Talentoday provides science-driven people analytics to fuel better decision-making at all points of the employment life cycle. Its technology analyzes and predicts workplace behavior, motivation, and success.

The personality assessment established by Talentoday is called MyPrint®. It’s a free, easy-to-use, self-reported questionnaire scientifically designed to explore individual personality and motivations at work through 96 questions, with an average completion time of 20 minutes.

To quote a passage from my book: “Both Talentoday and MyPrint have worked hand-in-hand to highlight the talents of each individual working within this company. It’s created such a positive image for everyone in our organization and has boosted productivity and morale in every facet of the business.”

The Origin of Personality Assessments & Why They Remain Relevant

In the article, Goldberg explains how personality tests were an outgrowth of World War I, when the American military sought to screen for soldiers who had weak constitutions or may be more susceptible to shell shock. Not long after that, Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Myers, developed their own personality test — the now popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator— despite having no psychological training.

Our Talentoday I/O Solutions Manager Daniela Heitzman, whose background lies in industrialized and organizational (I/O) psychology, is very familiar with this history.

“That origin aligns well with what’s going on today. We have another major world event, a global pandemic, that has created roles that we didn’t have previously, redesigned existing roles, and led to the large movement towards remote work,” she says. “We have new, different roles that have been created, roles that don’t look the same as they looked before; and we’ve made office roles into remote roles, and so what does that look like?”

Even just before the pandemic, we began to focus more on soft skills with an aim to use hard skills to bridge the gap because it’s easier to teach a hard skill than it is to teach a soft skill. Nurses, for example, need a good bedside manner and empathy, while someone in a tech role needs to be able to structure their day a certain way.

“That was one of the things we talked about, especially at the beginning of the pandemic when some roles were completely eliminated,” Daniela says. “Now we’re trying to use soft skills to reskill and upskill. How can you repurpose the soft skills you have for different roles? What skills can you work to increase to become a better fit for a role? Having good communication or organizational skills can be helpful across many job titles, so having an understanding of the skills you possess can help you focus on certain jobs over others.”

Next, hard skills can be taught to fill the gaps. For example, when a client has a big need to retain team members in a specific role, we look at what motivates this group as a whole. The answers can range from individuals motivated by the autonomy they can have in their role to the variety they can have in their day-to-day routine. Then, the employer can work to motivate and engage them based on our analytical data.

MyPrint does that with our soft skills assessments! The result? More productive, creative, happy team members equal productive, creative, happy teams. This leads to less turnover, stress, and burnout, and who doesn’t want that for their people? All from ensuring these motivations are met — fulfilling this one thing can lead to many wonderful outcomes.

People. It’s Always the People

We’ve always been a people-first organization, and we always will be. Our people make all the difference, and we are able to motivate them because the technology of Talentoday centers around people!

Because of these incredible resources, we were able to innovate in times of uncertainty and scale during a global pandemic. Whatever happens next, I know we’ll be just fine because of the people. It’s always the people.

Want to learn more about how we did it, and how your company culture can thrive through a crisis? Read all about it here.