The missing piece of MBTI the pandemic brought to the fore

Many professionals are exposed to the #myersbriggs Type Indicator sooner or later in their career and find it useful to help them wrap their head around different personality types – and figure out how to best work and interact with people with a different personality from their own. They find the #MBTI sufficiently intuitive and practically helpful that they don't mind the fact that the academic world sees several deficiencies in the MBTI framework, such as poor reliability and insufficient independence of dimensions.

The #pandemic has brought to the fore, however, another gap of the MBTI: It omitted the 5th major #personality dimension observed by psychologists which is called #neuroticism in the widely used and accepted OCEAN "Big Five" personality framework. According to some sources, Myers and Briggs omitted this dimension because they designed the MBTI as a positive, helpful tool but neuroticism is mostly seen as a negative trait.

As businesses want their staff to return to the office and employees face (literally) their (increasingly unmasked) co-workers in a post-Corona world, neuroticism often is the defining trait. The pandemic also showed why mother nature introduced neuroticism as a major human trait: When we face a potentially species-endangering threat such as a novel pandemic, it is uncertain exactly how cautious we need to be in order to survive. Rather than risking extinction of the human species by accidentally setting the caution dial too low, mother nature randomized how strongly individuals feel negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, and worry. Highly neurotic individuals experience fear of #Covid-19 much more strongly than the average human – and hence tend to also max out in taking precautions.

We only find out in hindsight where to draw the line between recklessness and excessive fear – and hence whether a neurotic person is the sole survivor of a particular threat or whether that person's fretting and worrying turned out to be overblown. As long as a particular risk persists, however, the majority of us experiences people high on the neuroticism spectrum as excessively driven by these fears. The problem: We tend to label them merely as "difficult" or "unreasonable", rather than accepting them for what they are in the way we would accept a "feeler" or "introvert" once we have put a co-worker into a neat MBTI box.

The upshot: Understanding why people high on neuroticism love their masks and might prefer a future eternally confined to working at home would be a good starting point to redesign the office experience in a way that also makes these co-workers feel at ease to be present. This can range from specific options for co-workers with an above-average fear of Covid-19 (e.g., an explicit encouragement to continue wearing FFP2 masks voluntarily if preferred or to increase work from home during the cold season) to subtle tweaks to the office set-up (e.g., the continued presence of hand disinfectant – something I have seen removed in one office to save cost in light of what was deemed "excessive" use by some people – or the availability of protected work spaces with additional partitions and ventilation) and specific requests to other colleagues (e.g., establishment of a new etiquette – already business as usual in Asia – to wear a mask when having a cold).

And considering that desensitization is often the best way to reduce fears, rather than coercing colleagues high on neuroticism back into the office with brute force, a more sensible strategy can be gradual transitions – e.g., starting with shorter stays in the office with particularly careful arrangements (such as holding a meeting with a fearful colleague in a particularly large meeting room so that this person can sit right next to a window with plenty of distance to everyone else). Often such interventions are best designed informally on a case-by-case basis, co-created with a colleague voicing particular concerns – i.e., rather than having the HR department trying to hammer out the perfect policy for half a million people, simply ask your one team member visibly hesitant to come back under what conditions a particularly important work meeting might feel less threatening. If done sincerely and with consideration to the colleague's feedback, I have seen people lower their fear level quite quickly, and you might soon catch said co-worker at the water cooler chatting and laughing with others as if it was 2019.

What have you seen work particularly well to make more fearful colleagues feel comfortable to return to the office? Are there other situations where you have observed people high on neuroticism to be misunderstood and hence poorly engaged with?