When you work outside of an office, a bad Wi-Fi connection or screaming kids in the background can put a real damper on your productivity. But technical difficulties and home distractions aren’t the only factors that make it hard to work remotely. In fact, many of a person’s successes or challenges with working from home have to do with his or her personality.
It’s easy to make broad generalizations about personality types, and assume that extraverts feel too isolated or distracted at home, or that introverts fall off the radar if someone doesn’t check in with them — and in some cases, it’s true. But there’s a lot more to someone’s personality traits — and consequently, their work preferences — than whether they like to work alone or surrounded by colleagues.
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment assigns people one trait from each of four type pairings: introversion or extraversion; intuition or sensing; thinking or feeling; and judging or perceiving. These traits inform the way a person perceives the world and makes decisions, and based on that, the MBTI offers insight into the way that person thinks and behaves. Michael Segovia, a lead certification trainer for people-development company and exclusive MBTI publisher CPP, shared some key strengths and weaknesses about the way each type pairing approaches remote work.