Top tips

New research sends clear message to team leaders

How micro habits are key to the environmental mission of our new charity partner, Take 3 for the Sea

If not, you might be part of a hybrid strategy that’s about to fail.

As employees return to the office, they’re expecting more flexibility in their social contracts with employers. How can HR help?

Change is inevitable. And as the hybrid workplace becomes a new normal for many organizations, it brings specific benefits and challenges to managing uncertainty and successfully implementing change initiatives.

Our recommended titles for you this World Book Day

6 things managers and executives can do

How you can gain instant insight from colourful MBTI type resources.

How to use research to create MBTI solutions: this post looks at leadership accountability gaps

John Hackston explores recent OPP research. 

Which MBTI book will you add to your collection this World Book Day?

Get the most from the MBTI assessment when coaching individuals.

Research based tips for more effective email communication between different MBTI personality Types.

How do different MBTI Types use and feel about email? We explore some recent research to see what we can learn

Looking for an easy to implement icebreaker? Bingo!

Cycling-inspired tips for team and leadership development

The power of persuasion in the context of MBTI Types - how do they differ?

What should we look out for in 2016? Here are our predictions...

Aidan Millar explores how coaches can help clients flex between operating with their natural MBTI preferences and outside them when necessary. 

Why do managers leave their jobs? We've looked at the research to bring you a summary

Quick fixes are great, but what about a long-term solution to managing stress?

No-one likes open plan offices, so what can we do about it? Check out this research-based advice.

The employment market seems to be improving, which is good news for jobseekers but not necessarily for employers; having more jobs available means that there are more opportunities for workers to leave. All the more important, then, that managers don’t give their people that extra incentive to start looking elsewhere. Here are five of the most common ways in which managers can (and unfortunately do) alienate their staff.

In my previous blog post, I set out five top tips for increasing the impact of team coaching based on my experience as an OPP Consultant. I’m aware of the increasing pressure on clients’ budgets and the need to ensure that investment in team coaching inspires permanent change and makes a lasting difference to performance. With this in mind, I offer five more tips.

As an OPP Consultant, I work with many teams across a wide variety of sectors and industries. I was recently talking to a client, herself an L&D practitioner, who asked me about my approach to team coaching – in  particular what my ‘top tips’ were for ensuring that the work had impact and made a real difference to how the team functions. This got me thinking about the key elements involved.

Well, not necessarily. But it is true that her demise could have been attributed to an all-too-common Sensing blind spot: a failure to quickly and accurately recognise how facts and present realities connect to a bigger picture – and often, a very meaningful one.

Whether you need to hire staff for your own business, or you conduct interviews on behalf of a client, it’s important to get the most out of every job interview. As a business psychologist, I have studied selection methods carefully and practised them throughout my working life. Here are some tips on how to maximise the effectiveness of your next interview.

It’s that time of year again... having reflected back on 2014, many will now be looking ahead to 2015 and identifying their self-improvement resolutions and goals for the year ahead.  Although I don’t personally set New Year’s resolutions, goal setting helps focus my intention, effort and actions. It seems timely to reflect on how we set goals, as many in organisations will be in the midst of reviewing performance against targets or key performance indicators (KPIs) and engaging in personal development planning for the year ahead.

Visits to our Personality Matters Blog were at an all-time high in 2014, and we covered a wide range of topics in our weekly posts. Over the last 12 months we've talked about the best MBTI-based books and the various resources available for L&D teams. We’ve promoted Movember, and we’ve chipped in to the Paul Flowers furore. We've continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from recruitment and assessment centres to polarity management. But what are the top five posts that readers have returned to again and again?

Staff retention is a major issue for many organisations. Some environments are feeling the effects more than others - call centres, for example, are practically haemorrhaging employees. Consequently, HR professionals need to find more effective ways to retain talent. Our blog post offers ten top tips for engaging with staff and keeping them on board.

To celebrate the launch of the new shop we thought it would be useful to highlight the most popular resources that have been purchased through our online ordering during 2014. These are the items that our customers find most useful (along with the many popular reports ordered by practitioners via OPPassessment). How many of them are in your portfolio of essential resources?

References on job candidates are a very valuable source of information, and yet they are being requested less and less by private sector employers. The main reasons are a fear on the part of the referee (or the referee’s employer) that if they give a candid reference, they might be sued; and scepticism on the part of the new employer about the value of any references they might obtain.

Training aids that are memorable and that bring clarity to descriptions of MBTI^® type are like gold dust. One of the commonest questions I come across in the various MBTI-related Linked In groups, including OPP’s own OPP Qualified Practitioners, is the plea for good exercises to help illustrate the MBTI preferences and dichotomies.

In the second of our blog posts looking at 20 invaluable books about MBTI^® and type, we review another ten titles that have impressed MBTI practitioners or been a key support in their work with the MBTI assessment. As with the first batch, the books featured here are listed in no particular order, and comments are from individual reviewers who responded to our request for reviews on the Linked In group OPP Qualified Professionals.

Which books about MBTI^® and type have had the biggest impact on practitioners? We posted this question on the Linked In group OPP Qualified Professionals earlier this year, to discover the titles that had most impressed and inspired practitioners or been a key support in their work with the MBTI assessment. Twenty books rose to the top of the pile. Here are the first ten – in no particular order – with comments from the individual reviewers.

I'm reading a book at the moment – Thanks for the feedback: the science and art of receiving feedback well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (Harvard Law School). I bought it on the strength of an article in the Saturday Guardian by Oliver Burkeman, which included a comment that really made me chuckle: “Tell me what I did well, tell me what I should do differently and don't confuse the two. If I wanted a sandwich, I'd go to the office canteen.” If only receiving feedback was as straightforward as eating a sandwich!

Few things in life are free – but OPP has some really cool free resources to support you in your work! To help celebrate our 25 years in the business, we’ve taken a trawl through the various goodies available for zero outlay on our website. They range from white papers and feedback materials to fun quick guides and infographics – many of which can also be found on our practitioner downloads page.

When used well, psychometric tools are a powerful output of scientific thought and research, and can be the key to unlocking the potential of an organisation’s most vital but complex asset: its people. But in the wrong hands, or with a misplaced sense of how they can be useful, things can go badly wrong. So how do you ensure you are commissioning or using tools that will get you kudos for creating lasting improvement, rather than a damp squib that will damage your reputation and that of your business? Here are our ten top tips.

The blog has been increasing in popularity over the last year. We've celebrated 70 years of the MBTI system with posts on best practice, ethics and the diversity of applications; we've blogged about topical events such as the horsemeat scandal, the European elections and Andy Murray's Wimbledon win; and we've continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from stress to benchmarking to onboarding and retention. But what are the top five posts that have kept readers coming back again and again?

There is a great deal of information out there on the web about psychometric tests and questionnaires – and, as with most things on the internet, some of it is absolutely wrong, especially when it comes to using these tools in selection. Here are ten common myths, along with the real story.

Workplace stress accounts for 40% of work-related illness, yet employers often shy away from giving stress the attention it deserves. The business psychologists at OPP are an exception though, giving plenty of thought to this lingering problem. We believe that if organisations and individuals take the right approach, they can build resilience and boost performance. Want to know more about that ‘right approach’? Then take a look at some of the best resources we’ve put together on the subject.

With the final of The Apprentice tonight we ask: what does it take to be an entrepreneur? The gruelling process of The Apprentice may entertain us, but it’s a long way from answering the question. So we’ve taken on the challenge and devised our own ‘Entrepreneurial Top Five’.

Look on any search engine for “personality assessment” and you’ll be offered a whole raft of results: from providers of products and services for specific areas of development, to a mind-boggling array of online questionnaires offering to tell you all about your personality. Many of these assessments are free, and some even give you a four-letter type, which looks just like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) information. So why should you use a qualified practitioner to administer the genuine article when you can access personality information so easily? Here are ten reasons why the MBTI assessment is the real deal.