How Employee Behavioral Styles Affect Your Bottom Line

Hiring the right person is more important than ever. While you probably have a lot of tools at your disposal for the hiring process, you might not be considering an important aspect of potential candidates: their behavior.

How exactly do the behavioral styles of your employees affect your bottom line?

The Right Fit in the Right Role

Not having the right behavioral style in the right job will affect engagement, productivity, and overall morale. While it’s possible for individuals to perform in a role that doesn’t align with their behavior or motivation, it will cause strain and stress in the long term.

At TTI Success Insights, we look at shifts from the natural to adapted styles in DISC. “The Natural Graph shows an individual’s natural behavior, or how they prefer to do what they do. The Adapted Graph shows how an individual adapts their behavior to fit the situation they are in,” we shared.

If someone is wildly shifting their behavior to adapt to their work role, it’s a strong indicator of a poor fit. This will cost you over time no matter how hard your team is working, since employee disengagement translates to a profit loss of 34% of the disengaged employee's annual salary, according to LinkedIn.

Get Specific: Benchmarking For Your Bottom Line

How can you make sure employees are engaged from the jump? You need to utilize the benchmarking process. Benchmarking is the process of creating the profile of the ideal candidate for a position and then measuring candidates against that profile.

It’s most commonly used in the interview process, but can also be used to measure an employee in their current role.

It’s possible to break roles down into precise maps of behavior and motivation, but make sure to remember that benchmarking is just a tool for your consideration, not the end-all-be-all of hiring. You don’t need a perfect fit and can hire against your benchmark if you find the right candidate.

You also need to be wary of discrimination, since benchmarking cannot be used to discriminate in the hiring process. Check out our article walking through benchmarking to understand how to handle bias and what not to do while benchmarking.

Move Forward With a Solid Team For Solid Profits

Understanding soft skills on your team should be a top priority for organizations. These skills are crucial to develop and understand your team, who will in turn develop and expand your network, profits, and company culture.

Something important to remember is that no two people are the same, and your employees can’t be put in a box. Behavior is an aspect of personality, which is a complex and multifaceted area of study. Personality can’t be summed up by an assessment, but aspects of personality (like behavior) can be measured and understood better.

Assessments are tools that gather information and consolidate that information into a shared vocabulary to increase understanding. Use the insights they bring to improve hiring, engagement, and retention.