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The Worqplace Performance Inventory is a series of 9 employment tests that are the result of thirty years of applied research and consulting to hundreds of organizations. Each of the Inventories focuses on a set of personal traits that leads to productive performance, enabling the tests to predict what people will do in a number of job functions. What’s important about the Performance Inventories is that the traits — the ingredients measured by the tests — are job-performance-related, not merely academic.
The PI test items ask applicants to report their everyday behavior, rather than to give their attitudes and opinions, thus making them more fake-resistant and less intrusive. Taking the tests is a benign experience. They are professionally presented as just one more part of the job application, revealing applicants’ qualifications. Written at the sixth grade reading level, the tests take applicants about seven minutes to complete.
Assessment descriptions.
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Service
Successful performance in customer service jobs is steered by a combination of underlying personality characteristics that primarily have to do with interpersonal skills. The PI-Customer Service assesses these service-related traits, including Agreeableness, Friendliness, Consideration, Cooperation, Empathy, Helpfulness, Self-awareness, Self-confidence, and Attentiveness.
Improvements are measurable when employees greet customers and smile pleasantly, communicate helpfully, show consistent courtesy, solve customer problems, and exhibit many other positive interpersonal acts, resulting in improved customer experience, repeat business, work team cohesion, and sales.
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Reliability
Many successful work behaviors can be traced back to a person’s reliability, which itself is multi-dimensional. Reliability is shown in many ways, ranging from positive constructive contributions to the low end of intolerable counterproductive acts. To measure the traits that underlie productivity, reliability, and norm acceptance, the PI-Reliability test measures. Conscientiousness, Achievement Motivation, Trustworthiness, Orderliness, Detail Attention, Self-control, and Rule-following.
Hiring the most reliable employees improves inventory shrinkage, involuntary termination, attendance, discipline incidents, rehireability, labor cost, material waste, and drug test positives. With fewer employee problems, manager labor cost is also reduced. High PI-Reliability scorers do many things that ultimately add up to working more and goofing off less.
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Retention
People leave hourly jobs for many reasons, only some of which are controllable. The PI-Retention increases tenure and reduces the turnover that is attributed to employee character. Employees who stay longer are high on the PI-Retention measures of Engagement, Motivation, Self-determination, Social Attachment, Self-control, Resilience, Personal Adjustment, and are low on Confrontation, Solitude, and Career Indecision.
PI-Retention scorers become stakeholders and form attachment to their jobs, and stay longer. Because the Retention scale includes some of the Reliability items, both involuntary and voluntary turnover is reduced, including that from job abandonment. With lower turnover, new employee training cost is also reduced.
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Clear Thinking
On the Performance Inventory-Clear Thinking test, applicants report their internal thinking behaviors that show how they tend to use their mental abilities. The Thinking scores do not measure intelligence, but how people leverage the intelligence they do have; there is a difference between having skills and using them well.
High scores are characteristic of those who actively think and analyze , concentrate without distraction, use logic over intuition, make careful judgments, consider facts and data in decisions, learn by visualizing , and solve problems by using good common sense. The disposition to perform these mental activities leads to being well-organized, foresightful, systematic, open to learning, unbiased, reflective, reasoned, competent, and appreciative of truth, all contributing to more effective job performance.
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Manager
The PI-Management test includes most of the facets of the Professional test, plus items related to Leadership, Courage, Communication, Planfulness, and Sociability . These traits identify managers and supervisors who lead with a balance of task and people concerns, make timely logical decisions, learn quickly, take responsibility, give constructive feedback, and develop staff loyalty.
More effective selection of managers improves profit and efficiency, employee labor cost, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, employee turnover, material waste, and employee theft.
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Sales
There are numerous paths to success in sales, and a variety of important traits and behaviors that lead there. These include Extroversion, Friendliness, Initiative, Effort, Resilience, Competitiveness, and Optimism —all gauged by the PI-Sales. People with higher levels of these traits keep busy, persuade others, dive into their work, handle rejection, and keep trying, which results in selling more products and services.
Improved outcomes are seen in the different measures of sales performance, such as dollar amount sold per hour, units sold per hour, percent of goals and quotas met, commission paid, and up-selling additions.
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Safety
Since the majority of workplace accidents result from human error, one impactful way to control these costs is to hire safer and more conscientious employees. People who are risk-takers for example, do things just for fun, cut corners, and violate policies, resulting in more accidents, damage, and injuries. The PI-Safety measures applicants’ Risk-taking, Attentiveness, Impulse Control, Boredom-proneness, Return-to-work incentive, and Stress Management, all underlie the behaviors that lead to safe behavior.
Employees who do well on the inventory are likely to be more conscientious people who follow safety rules, have fewer injury-absences and near-misses, work harder and show motivation to return to work. Once a workforce is hired with passing Safety scores, workers’ compensation claims costs and premiums go down.
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Logic
Of the Performance Inventory tests, Logic is the only one that assesses abilities, rather than personality traits. The Logic test is a non-verbal graphic test of logic and problem-solving abilities that correlates with successful performance in all jobs that require clear thinking. Because the items have no words or numbers, it is easily used cross-culturally.
The Logic test shows applicants’ Analytical, Problem-Solving, Comprehension, and Mental Agility skills, such as finding meaning in data, understanding concepts, drawing correct inferences, and understanding subtle and complex relationships. High scorers are intelligent, logical, perceptive, competent, and quick learners. Often, combining a mental power test such as Logic with performance-based personality tests predicts job success with the most validity possible.
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Professional
The Performance Inventory-Professional is a test of general productive performance in salaried and professional jobs. It covers the factors of Motivation, Work Efficiency, Personal Stability, Independence, and Thinking Skills that are characteristic of higher-level jobs. When professional employees score high on these characteristics, they can focus, multi-task, adapt to change, handle stress, prioritize, and work energetically.
The results of this better use of their native talents are improved productivity in their jobs, stronger promotability, and a deepened high-potential pool.