When you work with someone, you get to know their professional tendencies, including whether they can reliably be counted on to meet deadlines, whether they like to chat throughout the day, and how pleasant they are in conversation about business and issues that require compromise.
However, if you don’t spend time socially with this other person, you don’t get to know them beyond what is often a façade. That can matter greatly in retaining highly valued employees. It also matters in getting the most out of each employee. They may be a good employee, but if their managers and colleagues understood them better, could they be a great employee?
That brings me to consider the questions that can help work colleagues and team members get to know each other.
There is ample writing on this topic, which you can find doing a simple Google search for “questions to get to know someone better,” but I thought I’d share my own take on these questions, based on my own experiences and observations about personalities in the workplace.
Ask Them What They Consider Fun
Perhaps I should keep this a well-guarded secret, but if I’m being honest, I do not enjoy challenges. So the last thing I want to do during time off from work is undertake a challenge. I groan when hiking shows up in a trip itinerary. I groan even louder if it’s a sunrise hike. Waking up early, plus walking uphill? How awful! Instead, I’d be happy to take a long walk on relatively flat land at sunset followed by cocktails.
Many other people, however, love a good hike. Some even enjoy rock climbing and running marathons—sometimes even races where you pay money to run in mud (I know someone who did that!).
What do these personality differences mean for the workforce? Beyond knowing who to send where on which client outings, it provides insight into what some may be more up for than others.
Whereas a person like me is highly reliable in meeting deadlines and delivering quality work, another employee may be more excited about “stretch” assignments, where they deliberately put themselves in uncomfortable situations.
Someone like me doesn’t enjoy being uncomfortable, but the good news is the same things that make that other person uncomfortable enough not to do well at a task, regardless of how much they enjoy a challenge, are things that may not make me uncomfortable at all, and, therefore, happy to take on.
Ask Them What They Consider to Be Difficult in Life
Maintaining spreadsheets and crunching numbers is hard for me. What’s easy for me is thinking fast on my feet and expressing myself articulately, even in front of a crowd. I can speak extemporaneously with ease usually, preferring it to working with notes.
My challenge-loving colleague may be up for trying to do this, but their brain may not work like mine. They simply may lack the ability.
Asking employees to share with colleagues what they find fun versus hard can help shed light on why one employee excitedly dives into tasks, no matter what they are (even if they don’t do well at those tasks), while another employee prefers not to push themselves, and yet be able to effortlessly complete tasks their manager didn’t think to assign them.
Ask Them What Annoys Them Most in Life
I find annoyance in so many different places it would be hard to pick just one or even a few. I would recommend breaking this question into environmental (or ambient) annoyances and interpersonal annoyances.
Ambient humming and whistling would be at the top of my list of ambient annoyances. I once was in a travel group with a woman who constantly hummed quietly to herself. I kept saying, “Where is that humming coming from?” hoping she would take the hint, but she never did.
Others will say just the opposite—that they find it annoying to work and live in a place where there is little to no noise.
This can point to how to provide each employee with the ideal work environment. The employee with low tolerance of ambient noise, for example, would not do well sitting alongside a hallway that serves as the primary passage into and out of the office. I was situated in such a spot once and had more than one confrontation with the same person who seemed to be whistling out of spite when he walked past my desk, even after I asked him not to.
Meanwhile, an extroverted, loud-voiced colleague may have been placed in an interior spot, within a sea of workstations, where their co-workers were forced to put headphones on to escape the constant talking noise.
Interpersonally, I don’t like when others tell me they will do something and then don’t follow through or don’t give me a heads-up when it isn’t going well. It’s one thing to keep colleagues or a manager abreast of how an assignment is going, and then to let them know, midway through, that it isn’t working; it’s quite another to take on the assignment and wait until the day it’s due to tell them it hasn’t and won’t be done.
There are others who don’t appear to mind this situation so much—who almost enjoy having to tear up their plans at the last minute—who love a good “hustle.”
Once you understand where employees fall along the spectrum of reliability and good communication versus high tolerance for last-minute scrambling, you can put them in roles and give them assignments that play to their strengths and may even encourage them to stay in their jobs for a long time.
What questions have you found most helpful for getting to know employees’ true personalities and tendencies?