People undoubtedly work better together when they understand the way that their colleagues function. A DISC profile is an excellent way of enabling teams to build this type of mutual understanding together. By outlining what is important to people and how they perform most effectively, a DISC assessment can genuinely help individuals to understand how they can work most effectively and how they can get the best out of other people.

What is a DISC profile UK ?

DISC assessments cover four key areas:

• D - Dominance

• I - Influence

• S - Steadiness

• C - Compliance

These four characteristics are brought together to explore how a person performs best and how they will react to particular situations that they may encounter daily in the workplace. DISC reports make it quite clear that there is no one 'correct' set of behaviours of working style. Instead, a team made up of many DISC profiles is generally required for companies to achieve the best possible results. As well as explaining the results, our DISC profile reports provide targeted and valuable information to help the profiled person understand the data they are reading and get the most out of their DISC assessment profile.

Opportunities for Development

Our reports are highly action-oriented, containing key takeaways which recipients can use to improve their behaviour and working styles right away. These come after an explanation of how the DISC assessment process works and how the results we are presenting have been put together.

As well as points for immediate action, the reports encourage recipients to take the time required to sit down, understand and process their results. This is essential if the findings are to be used as part of a longer-term goal setting and personal development process. While the results are initially presented in terms of the individual areas of the DISC profile, there are plenty of opportunities for recipients to bring together information from multiple areas of the report to gain a proper understanding of their working style. Examples of this can be found in our sample report, which is free to download.

Ensuring Maintained Improvements

A common issue with companies that commission DISC profiles and similar assessment exercises face is ensuring that the results are actually accepted and understood by their teams and are then fed into more comprehensive improvements, which help the business to work more effectively. Our reporting style is designed to lead to a discussion between team members, both in formal and informal settings, allowing them to compare their results with each other and understand how they can combine their strengths to produce better collaborative pieces of work.

The results of our DISC profiles can be used in multiple ways. Long-form explanations of particular categories and behaviour types are included, but there are also short and snappy bullet-pointed summaries. These are particularly useful for teams that may be working remotely and have limited opportunities to socialise and get to know each other. This can often make it difficult for team members to develop an understanding of the way their colleagues work, leading to poor working styles, a lack of collaboration between them, and occasional bad feelings that could have been avoided if people had a better understanding of how their peers worked.

How to Get the Most from a DISC Profile

Before launching a DISC assessment exercise with your team, it is essential to make sure that they understand the purpose of the activity. Make it clear to them that you are trying to help them understand themselves and work more effectively and that there are no 'right answers'. If you don't do this, it is possible that you may receive skewed results as the team is more likely to try and tell you what they think you want to hear rather than giving answers that genuinely reflect themselves. If they do this, they are likely to receive a report that contains information that won't help them to work more effectively or allow them to improve their job satisfaction.

Similarly, it is vital to make sure that time is set aside so that a team is able to take the DISC profile exercise seriously and complete the questions thoughtfully and effectively. Suppose the assessment is quickly filled in during a lunch break or another brief pause in a person's daily routine. In that case, the value of the exercise is likely to be reduced. DISC profiles are designed to be long-term projects that give employees areas to focus on over one year or more. For this reason, it is imperative to ensure that the DISC assessment is taken seriously and that nobody taking it is worried about how the results will be used.

Emotional Intelligence Measurement

For a true understanding of how people act and interact in the workplace and beyond, it is necessary to go beyond standard DISC profiling and dive deeper into the way that individuals work. That is why, unlike many of our competitors, our DISC assessment UK reports contain information about the emotional intelligence of the person taking the test. This is another aspect that ensures the reports provide helpful information to the people taking them and that they are used for a significant amount of time after the testing process has been completed.

All of the above details should make it clear just how valuable a DISC assessment process can be to a company. Whether you're trying to get the best out of a remote team that has limited time to get to know each other or reinvigorate a group that has been working together for many years, a DISC report can be a great way of doing this. What's critical is that you ensure the team has plenty of time to complete the report, understand how the results will be used and can see what value the assessment and process will offer to them. If you can do all of these things, then a DISC report is likely to unlock significant value in your organisation.