Articles & Research

5 minute read Some of the same companies that cut roles in the name of AI efficiency are now paying a premium to bring those people back. New reporting on 2026 layoffs found that up to 55 percent of employers regret their AI-driven layoffs, and nearly a third of hiring managers who eliminated roles for…

Understanding personality is the first step. The challenge for most organizations is figuring out what comes next. Maybe you’ve been here before: a team workshop, a stack of assessment reports, and a conversation that finally gives people language for differences they’ve been navigating for years. Heads nodded around the room. People recognized themselves in the…

What the research says about personality measurement, and how Paradigm Personality Labs makes it useful for organizations. If you’ve spent any time exploring personality science — for your organization, your team, or even yourself — you’ve likely come across the Big Five. It’s hard not to. The Big Five is the gold standard of personality…

When a team starts to lose its edge, the instinct is to look for someone or something to blame. Leaders pull up performance reviews. They scan for obvious errors. They try to trace where things went off track. Most of the time, there’s no single moment and no single person at fault. That’s because the…

Google’s 2012 Project Aristotle provided groundbreaking research on what drives team effectiveness and high performance 1 .

For decades, competency frameworks have helped organizations define what good performance looks like and guide how people grow. They bring structure, consistency, and a shared language to hiring, development, and evaluation. But they were never designed to explain everything. Most competency models answer one question well: What does strong performance look like? What they don’t…

High performer burnout rarely looks like failure. More often, it shows up in individuals who continue to meet expectations long after their experience of the work has started to shift. Two people can operate at a similarly high level, receive consistent positive feedback, and be seen as equally capable. Their performance reviews are strong, their…

Workplace performance and employee engagement challenges don’t announce themselves in an obvious way.

Managers are leading in a work environment that looks nothing like it did even five years ago. Distributed teams. Digital overload. Economic pressure. AI transformation. Constant change. Through it all, one truth remains: managers have an outsized influence on employee engagement and team performance. Gallup estimates they influence roughly 70% of the variance in team…

For years, companies have tried to boost employee engagement from the bottom up. They survey workers, invest in wellness programs, and encourage leaders to check in more often. But engagement rarely rises or falls because of initiatives aimed at frontline employees. It rises and falls with managers. Today’s managers are carrying a level of strain…

What if understanding your personality wasn’t just a one-time revelation, but an ongoing resource you could return to throughout your career? That’s where personality insights become powerful—when they’re applied. When people connect what they’ve learned about themselves to how they communicate, collaborate, and lead every day. That belief inspired the creation of We, the WorkPlace…

Only 16% of employees say their last conversation with their manager was meaningful (Gallup). Even well-intentioned conversations can miss the mark when there’s no common language to describe how people work. Great conversations build great teams, but to make that possible, managers need a common framework to discuss behavioral differences—one that strengthens understanding, alignment, and…

HR teams today are being asked to do the impossible: increase engagement, improve retention, support development, and strengthen culture, all without adding more programs, more people, or more hours in the day. That’s why we created The WorkPlace Big Five Profile®. Built on the gold-standard Five-Factor Model and grounded in over 40 years of behavioral…

Employee engagement is one of today’s biggest business challenges. Turnover is costly. Burnout is widespread. And people are craving more meaningful work. Managers and HR leaders want to support employees better, but launching yet another program is an unlikely solution. What often gets overlooked is that disengagement doesn’t start with workload or lack of recognition.…

Every year, organizations spend billions on training and development programs hoping to fix “people problems.” But if someone’s role works against their natural strengths, all the workshops and coaching in the world won’t change the outcome. Instead of unlocking engagement, you get: Short-lived performance spikes that fade within weeks. Frustrated employees who feel like they’re…

Managers hear it all the time: You need to coach more. You need to coach better. But while many try, their efforts often fall flat. They either default to advice-giving, get stuck in surface-level conversations, or avoid it altogether, saying they don’t have the time, the skill, or the confidence to do it right. The…

In many organizations, development is still treated as a privilege for the few. Executives get leadership coaching, personality assessments, and bespoke training. Meanwhile, the rest of the workforce, the 80% who actually power your culture and customer experience, are left to figure it out on their own. That’s where disengagement, turnover, and stalled performance take root.…

HR leaders are under growing pressure to reduce turnover, support managers at every level, and drive business impact through people, often with limited headcount or bandwidth. Traditional personality assessments don’t scale, and they rarely deliver actionable insight across the organization. The WorkPlace Big Five Profile® is different. It’s a science-backed, enterprise-ready personality assessment that helps…

This was the team that was supposed to turn things around. The struggling business had restructured the organization to unite several talented individuals to lead the transformation as a team. Each member brought an impressive résumé and a wealth of experience. They also had a history of working well cross-functionally. Objectives of their new project…

Like so many people over the last few years, I recently enjoyed binge-watching the television series The Bear, a fictional dramedy that follows Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (played brilliantly by Jeremy Allen White), a fine-dining chef who returns home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop after a personal tragedy. It has all…

Imagine yourself at a job interview, and the interviewer asks you this question: “At our organization, we rely on daily, in-person meetings to check in on tasks and progress. How does that align with your style?” The truth? You prefer asynchronous, email check-ins to daily, in-person meetings. So, how do you respond? Do you say…

“Does nature or nurture determine your personality?” This is one of the most commonly asked questions in the personality assessment industry. To answer that question, let’s talk about cake. If we whisked only eggs and flour together, can we call it cake? No, because there’s still a lot missing—butter, spices, milk, and flavors. These ingredients are…

If you ask someone how they might improve their sense of happiness and contentment with life – also known as their subjective wellbeing (SWB) –, most would cite tried and true methods such as exercise, creative pursuits, a lifestyle closer to nature. But few would probably note the linkage between happiness and organization or diligence.…

One major consideration before investing in a new tool for your business is the return on investment (ROI). It can be easier to determine the ROI on tangible assets like upgrading equipment or a new automated marketing system. But what about personality assessments? When used correctly, personality assessments can help you improve workplace culture, leading to…

Personality assessments in the workplace are often viewed as a soft investment—useful for team-building, but hard to justify when budgets are tight or CFOs are pressing for hard numbers. But that perception is outdated. When used strategically, personality assessments can drive measurable business results, reducing mis-hires, improving engagement, and building stronger, more aligned teams. And…

Investing in your people and uncovering what keeps them engaged will have a direct, positive impact on their workplace interactions, their professional development, and their overall job satisfaction. Enhancements in these areas can lead to long-lasting improvements in the recruitment and retention of key personnel and significant, long-term benefits for your business. Personality assessments provide…

When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, the company’s once-thriving profit margins took a nosedive. Within a year, Apple found itself on the brink of insolvency, losing over a billion dollars. When Jobs returned, he swiftly turned the company’s fortunes around, implementing a robust management structure and cultural norms that still define Apple today. As…

Everyone remembers Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, in the movie “Groundhog Day”. Phil finds himself trapped in a time loop; he’s forced to relive the same day – February 2 – repeatedly. Over the course of the time loop, and movie, Phil transforms from self-centered and cynical into a more empathetic and proactive person, ultimately…

Leadership is not for the faint of heart. It beckons you to grow and stretch in ways that are unknown until you are in the thick of it and question whether you’re really doing it right. Leaders have a far greater impact on the well-being

Most of us recognize that all work all the time is killing us. It’s killing our productivity, it’s killing our engagement, and it’s killing our capacity for effective, sustained focus.

Employee engagement is a big topic for good reasons, but “Improving Engagement” often seems like a daunting and abstract task. This challenge has very little to do with identifying reasonable first steps (ChatGPT, Claude, and google provide similar sets of suggestions), the “whats” of employee engagement if you will.

More generally, framing is simply the way we look at or describe things. Framing declining sales as a “sales problem” or as a “product problem” is a big deal because those different framings lead to enormous differences in analysis, decision-making, and action. Choose the wrong frame and you’ll end up solving the wrong problem and putting your business at risk.

When I was in the fifth grade, I changed schools. The new school had a placement test with two sections: Verbal and Math. Being 10 years old, I wasn’t too worried so when my mom dropped me off with my two No. 2 pencils

It can happen to all of us at some point in our careers. Sometimes, there’s just no spark in our workday. We can be quick to call it burnout. But it might be boredom. I’ve been there. In my case, it was a new job at the beginning of my career. I wanted to contribute and have interesting work, but first, I needed to learn the boring-to-me administrative ropes of the role before I was sent off for training. In the training program, I knew I’d learn the exciting elements that represented learning, growth, and the accomplishment of being a professional. I needed patience. In the meantime, I was bored.

Organizations are facing unprecedented challenges in finding talent. Once people are hired, the next hurdle is ensuring that they stay, are interested in their work, and contribute to organizational goals. In other words, organizations need to keep employees engaged.

Think of a job that you chose to leave (or are about to leave). What was the core problem? Reasons vary but there are typically some recurring themes tied to engagement: · No forward path (or someone actively blocked it)