Running psychometric profiles on new and existing employees has become the norm for many HR professionals, and the insights they provide in terms of basic – and even sometimes adaptive – behaviour have certainly allowed more effective management styles to evolve. With comment from CEO of Ensize UK, Michelle Mills-Porter.

But with reports often beige at best, we’ve never been able to step past the two dimensional limitations imposed and achieve the promised potential. With the efficacy of the company’s reports already backed up by stellar results from the latest validity reports (which show it’s the most accurate available), their promises seem sound. CEO of Ensize UK, Michelle Mills-Porter explains just what this secret ingredient is and how combining it with behaviour profiling can offer HR Managers across the country their own pair of x-ray glasses when it comes to understanding and managing their teams.

“Behavioural profiling has come on leaps and bounds over the last decade, but it’s always felt that we’ve stopped short of the final piece in the jigsaw – that something which lifts a flat two-dimensional profile into a living, breathing truly bespoke document which has very much more commercial value to an organisation. Driving forces are the completely-personal values and motivators which explain why we behave as we do, with a very real focus on what’s happening in our life and our ‘window on the world’ at that time, and demonstrate why two individuals with identical profiles behave completely differently from one another. For the first time, Ensize has brought together behaviour profiling and combined it with the measurement and analysis of an individual’s core values and beliefs, and offers a completely new dimension to psychometric profiling. 

We can look at driving forces personally per employee to really get to grips with what motivates and inspires each person, we can review team values, and we can even model this company-wide, and combine them with behaviour profiling to offer results which not only allow us to engage more effectively at an individual and collective level, build very real rapport, and intelligently dissolve conflict, but actually potentially support even the most robust change management programme.

And what commercial impact will this form of profiling actually have on business? Well latest research suggests that by 2020 more than 535,000 workers will be held back by a lack of soft skills – essentially their ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI), skills which now carry more weight than ever before, with many firms placing the skills higher on their ‘wish list’ than traditional academic results. Any insights that a manager can be given into the behaviours, motivators and drivers of their teams is worth its weight in gold – both for their own EI and to support the development of this in those they’re responsible for and to.

For many managers, being able to communicate more effectively with their members of staff and helping them to be more efficient would be ground-breaking, and this form of profiling essentially enables this. Professionals can really get underneath the skin of their team, in turn developing performance-improvement or supportive strategies based on each individual’s goals, values and drivers as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

Being able to adapt their ways of working with each team member is vital in successful management and motivation longer term, and with an upwards-turning economy employees are increasingly looking for very much more than a pay-check and list of hard benefits to stay in a role. A whole raft of recent surveys back up the assertion that employees who feel engaged and aligned with a business are very much more likely to stay, and to succeed, and give a further glimpse into the potential power of this next generation report.”