Bridging the Personality Gap

Depending on the size of your organisation, there will always be a mix of personalities, approaches and thinking when it comes to a workplace, large or small. And whilst diversity will always reap more benefits than hassle when it comes to new ideas, different skill backgrounds and innovation, it can always conjure up moments of conflict and friction which can be difficult to navigate.

The first step in ensuring that this diversity evolves into collaboration is accepting those differences. Collaboration is born from acceptance rather than an attempt to convert traits and personalities to what you ideally think works for your organisation. Embrace the differences and bridge the personality gap. Let’s delve into the importance of doing this and top tips for your HR team to support colleagues to accept diversity of personality.?

Acceptance of Differences?

Culture is crucial for any business. Long gone are the days of basic office cubicles, holiday leave and salary entitlements. In 2022, Irish workers in every sector expect a clear company culture that incorporates company values. However, a company culture shouldn’t dictate how certain personalities are encouraged, while others are discouraged.?

Yes, differences can be difficult to negotiate; different mannerisms, traits, ways of working and responding to challenges. These differences can bring up negative emotions as others learn how to recognise and manage these, but they can also reap the reward of diversity, fresher approaches to work as well as positive balance when faced with workplace stress and challenges.?

Rather than pushing colleagues to change their personality or outlook to fit in with your company culture, your culture should instead not only accept, but embrace, the differences for what they are, encouraging others to respect these differences and work together to collaborate effectively.?

Embracing the Difference: Top Tips

1. Identify Your Differences

In order to understand how to build your company culture to embrace the differences in colleague personalities, traits and mannerisms, you first need to identify these differences.?

Use your HR team and HR tools to begin to engage your colleagues to understand their own personalities. From in-depth personality tests to 1-1s, group activities to team building days, there are various methods that you can use to begin building relationships between your colleagues and understanding better the differences in your colleagues, their outlook on their careers, how they approach tasks and how they prefer to work together and deal with their own focus time.?

By taking the time to identify the differences, this will help form your methods on how to promote improved collaboration across your workforce, and inform your HR colleagues how best to approach the company culture to embrace differences rather fight against them.?

2. Work Together?

Once you have effectively identified the various differences across your workplace community, use your HR team to understand how your management and colleagues can get a better handle of how to negotiate personalities across teams.

Perhaps certain colleagues prefer focus time over group approaches to work. Understand that this shouldn’t be something to fight against, but is a key way for your colleagues to remain productive. On the other hand, some colleagues may perform better by working together in a group-based format. Instead of pushing against this to opt for a more single focused approach to work, embrace it - understand that your colleagues prefer different approaches to work and by accepting what works for them, you’ll guarantee future productivity and performance improvements.?

Most importantly, if your workplace culture needs it, use your HR team to build deeper feelings of respect amongst colleagues, and your business’ need for colleagues to work together, despite any differences. Through respect, patience and understanding, your staff’s personalities can blossom in a positive way for your business.?

3. Remain Flexible

It isn’t enough to simply have a one-off culture exercise to embrace difference - it’s crucial that your business remains flexible to ever-changing personalities and traits, both individually and via generations.?

By building a company culture of respect and understanding, your HR team can help colleagues to learn to remain flexible with each other regardless of traits, to approach tasks with preferred ways of working in mind, and to consider personalities in all aspects of the workplace - from review processes, to social events, to task allocation and everything in between.

David Bell is CEO at The HR Department