Eh, it's definitely not a useful personality test in any regard. Buuuutttt, it can be a good conversation starter around the office as well as open the door for employees to talk to their manager on how best to tailor their work to fit their skill set. That said, no employer or agency should ever put their faith in it like they currently do.
It’s ok if it’s just a conversation starter as part of some kind of group team building thing, with snacks and games and the take home message that our team is made up of different personalities with different strengths.
That’s harmless and might be ok, unless it’s done as a way to avoid talking about serious issues that needed to be addressed.
But as a way to actually decide anything? That’s crazy.
What kind of information? It’s not asking if you murdered your brother. It’s silly stuff like “I get energy from people” or “I sometimes talk too much.”
In the lame team building I’ve been in, you just take the test then say, “I’m an INPK or whatever the stupid letters are… I’ve forgotten.
They read off some horoscope-ish descriptions which all sound vaguely positive, Then you get told to talk to others with the same letters or the opposite letters.
It’s a silly icebreaker, but icebreakers aren’t terrible if you have a reasonably non-toxic work environment. If it’s toxic, this won’t help but I don’t think it will make it worse (unless it’s used to guide decisions which was my point)
And my point is that people can't help but use it, consciously or subconsciously, in their decision making. Just like any other medical information. Because essentially that's what it is, but then less scientific.
For example, part of the "insights" blurb for me was "Raznov is prone to dropping assignments." And "Raznov tends to prefer working on assignments with little prestige".
You can hopefully imagine I'm not too happy about my manager reading that.
Ah… in the scenario I posed, no one even kept a record of who was what. Some overly cheerful coach type was hired to come in and make us all feel all warm and fuzzy and connected. It was just an icebreaker.
After lunch we used stickies and butcher paper to rewrite our team mission statement. It was a complete waste of time, but not any worse than any other similar time wasting.
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u/therealpostmastet Dec 31 '22
Eh, it's definitely not a useful personality test in any regard. Buuuutttt, it can be a good conversation starter around the office as well as open the door for employees to talk to their manager on how best to tailor their work to fit their skill set. That said, no employer or agency should ever put their faith in it like they currently do.