Christmas Team Building Session

It’s that time of year again when perfume and album adverts start to appear on the TV, social media starts to advertise increasingly lavish advent calendars for grown-ups (within increasingly huge price tags) and a few organised people get dates in the diary for your work night out. That’s right, its nearly CHRISTMAS!

There are under 100 days to go before Christmas. If you are thinking about arranging a Christmas team meeting or event, how about something a little bit different? If you are looking for a fun, but useful activity for your team, try one of our team building sessions.

Each team member completes the Persona Personality questionnaire in advance of the meeting. After a brief introduction to the subject of personality, our facilitator will lead the team in a few fun exercises to determine where on the Persona Wheel each team member sits, and to learn how an understanding of personality can benefit the team.

Teams will get to know each other better, to understand why team members react in the way they do, what causes frictions and how to avoid this, and how best to approach colleagues. Many team issues spring from ineffective communication and our team session helps to minimise these.

Organise your team session today; either order on our website by choosing from the Team Building Persona Package or the Persona Team Meeting Session, or contact us on admin@i-comment360.com to organise a bespoke session.

Colourful Christmas Personalities

In personality terms, and just for fun, here are a few festive personality traits:

Reds: They will head to the shops knowing what they are going to buy for each person. They will visit each shop on their list in turn buying gifts. If the thing they want is not available, they will make a considered substitution. Christmas shopping will be done and dusted in one or two efficient trips to the shops.

Yellows: Christmas shopping is about having fun! They will head out with friends to browse the shops, stop for a festive drink and get distracted looking at their favourite store. They will see the perfect present for someone, buy it on impluse buy it on impulse, then their attention will be diverted to something else that catches their eye. Yellows may many enjoyable trips to the shops and finish their shopping at 5pm on Christmas Eve.

Greens: A lot of consideration goes into sourcing the right gift for the right person. Gifts may well be personalised, possibly hand-made or crafted, and thoughtfully sourced. The Green’s aim is to give the perfect present to make recipient the smile.

Blues: They have made a list, checked it twice, done the research and has everything wrapped well in advance. Most shopping may well be done online to avoid crowds and get the best deal for exactly the right present. The last posting dates (which also seem to get earlier and earlier each year) are met, with gifts sent off to relatives in far flung places in plenty of time.

Channel your inner Blue and organise your Christmas team meeting now. But Yellows, if you leave it until December, we will do our best to fit you in!

Evolution of language

Language is a constantly evolving thing. New words enter the English language each year and other words fall out of use. Recent years have seen such words as furlough, lockdown and vax become much more regularly used, words like humblebrag have been added to the dictionary and words considered to be archaic, such as aerodrome, have been removed.

Our Personality system relies on language and how it is used. Each of the questions in the personality questionnaire asks you to rate sets of words, in the order that they apply to you. For example, “Driving, forceful, focussed” or “Popular, trusting, animated” – which is most like you?

However, different words mean different things to different people, and the meanings of words can change over time. The word “awful” once meant worthy of awe, but has changed to mean now terrible. A more modern example is “cloud” which, as well as referring to the fluffy white or grey things in the sky, now means parts of the internet which allow us to access information from anywhere.

The words in our personality questionnaire are also subject to these changes in language. We work with a charity which supplies reports to young people, some of whom have had a difficult start in life. Our questionnaire was developed for use in a business setting and not all the words were suitable for young people with less experience of the world of work.

Validation

Our system has an inbuilt validation system which allows us to ensure each question working, so that the participant gets an accurate report. When adapting the original questionnaire for use by the young people, we looked at each question and the words used, made changes and then tested the questionnaire to check that the results were as accurate.

Words like “congenial” were replaced with “friendly” and “correct” was replaced with “plays by the rules” to make the questionnaire more young person friendly. We tested this questionnaire thoroughly, examined the validation data, and the views of the young people receiving their reports. The results speak for themselves, when one young person thought that we must have spoken to their parents to write such an accurate report!

As language changes over time, the words in our questionnaires must be reviewed to check that they are still giving the correct results. As words fall out of favour and attitudes change, the word “caring” in our questionnaire becomes a more attractive option for people to pick, as society places more importance on being caring than it did in the past. By the same token, the words “challenging” and “demanding” may seem to have more negative connotations than they once did.

As language evolves, so must our questionnaire. Our validation system gives us the tools to monitor these changes and adapt to them, so our Personality Profiles are as accurate as possible.

The validation system will be invaluable when translating the questionnaire into other languages. The nuances of language mean a literal translation from English to any other language would be unlikely to yield accurate results, but that is a topic for another time. However, if you are interested in partnering with us to translate the Personality system, please get in touch!

New Personality System

We are proud to announce the launch of our new, upgraded Personality Profiling system! The initial i-comment360 personality system was designed by Peter in back in 2012 and since then we have run thousands of reports for hundreds of organisations across the world. Time has moved on and so has technology. The old system was showing its age; although the content was fantastic (if we do say so ourselves), the reports looked a bit dull and outdated.

The new system does all the things that the old one did, and more. The reports have been updated and now look rather snazzy (again, just our opinion, but try one and see if you agree) with lots of colour and graphics to enhance the text.

It also gives us the functionality to, if desired, add a gender-neutral option to the report, something which we don’t think is offered by any other Personality Profiling system. We had received a number of queries from organisations using our old report, asking if a gender-neutral report was an option. We had to say no, although we don’t like disappointing any of our customers.

A complex project

But then, just as we were in the process of implementing the new system, a project landed on our desks which required around 150 Personality Profiles for a team building event at a company away day. The company concerned have a number of staff who identify as non-binary, and in order treat everyone equally, they requested that all the reports were gender neutral.

This was much more than a cut and paste exercise, and it had a tight deadline (which fell just after the big celebration of Peter and Gill’s 50^th wedding anniversary). Peter and I spent a week reviewing all the statements in our database (and there are tens of thousands, just in the sections for these reports), rewriting them to take out any references to he, she, himself, herself, him, her etc. All the nuances of the English language made this a challenge! But we got there in the end and it was worth it as the customer’s team building event went very well.

Our Personality questionnaire has always asked the participant for their choice of gender pronouns, so we could insert he or she into the report as appropriate, and now we have a gender-neutral report to offer as well. If you want one, or not if you don’t. It’s up to you, but it is an option.

We always try out best to accommodate customer requests and love to have happy customers when they receive their reports. As one customer said recently to Peter when requesting a new type of report, “The answer is always yes.” If you want something different, just ask!