WSA-Combo
Combination of WSA Employee and Manager Version
The reports include colored graphs and pie charts that reveal an employee's strengths, flexibilities, adaptability, and non-preferences. Specific, practical advice, including a self-improvement Action Plan and a Personal Monitoring System.
WSA Profiles reveal all of your employees' biophysical and conditioned style elements in the six key areas of the Work Style Pyramid Model: Information Processing, Sensory Modalities, Physical Work Needs, Environmental Preferences, Social Aspects, Professional Attitudes.
The WSA Combo combines two reports:
Manager Report (addressed to the supervisor of the employee who completed the WSA questionnaire)
Employee Report (addressed to the employee who completed the WSA questionnaire)
The reports are bundled into a convenient, ready-to-buy package. It costs less than conventional psychometric tests, but goes deeper.
WSA Manager Combo - Advantages for managing employees:
- Better communication between colleagues
- Sharper problem-solving and creativity
- More productive meetings
- Less stress under pressure
- More user-friendly workspaces
- Sharper problem-solving and creativity
- More productive meetings
- Better time management
- Stronger teams
- Better personnel selection and promotion
- Increased flexibility and tolerance
- More successful training through better group understanding
- More effective management and leadership based on diversity principles
WSA Manager Combo - Better understanding of employees:
- Attitude towards authority
- Motivation
- Levels of responsibility
- Perseverance in difficult tasks
- Communication style
- Attention to detail
- Ability to see the big picture
- Suitability for shift work
- Changes in working style under stress
- Information Technology and Computers
- Requirements for 'Learning on the Job'
- Responding to changes
Individualisation through Learning and Working Styles
by Barbara Prashnig
These days there is more and more content to learn in less and less time. Because learning at work, or in life for that matter, is not like learning in school – there are no fixed hours outside training sessions or lectures and traditional, analytic training approaches do not reach the majority of today's trainees. Therefore, breaking down content, minimizing and supporting it with technology, allowing time flexibility in fast-paced environments generally leads to increased learning effectiveness.
However, for long-term results and sustainability of learning outcomes there is one more factor – in my experience the most important one: individualisation.
It is vitally important for the manager of the future, for a business trainer or coach, for a team leader or lecturer, to know what goes on in people's heads, how they think, what makes them succeed or fail and how they need to be supported to allow them to grow and develop their full learning and work potential. That's why the Manager Version of the WSA is so important for managers because it reveals style features of employees which cannot be discovered by observation or interviewing only.
Understanding how people prefer information intake, how they think, concentrate and perform best in daily work activities, in training and learning situations, particularly under stress, is the basis for successful learning – be it at work, in training or in educational settings. Participants learn quicker, absorb more information in less time and remember longer if they are allowed to do it THEIR way. It is particularly beneficial when huge amounts of information need to be absorbed in short periods of time.
Individualisation vs. Personalization
It’s quite easy to explain what individualisation means: it’s applying strategies suited to individual learning needs, taking into account preferences and non-preferences and accepting that this naturally varies from person to person. This approach is teacher or trainer-driven, currently very en vogue and individuality is the new credo in many companies. Not so much in mass education because when using traditional teaching methods like mass instruction and frontal teaching/lecturing it is impossible to teach to individuals or cater for individual learning needs in large student groups. Effective individualization is only possible when the instructor knows the natural learning styles of their trainees and students, knows how they learn best, and can then prepare individual programmes – if there is time! For this reason, individualisation is mostly good will and lip service because practical application is extremely difficult and time-consuming for the teacher or trainer, often Utopia, even when individual results are available.
After years of working with the ‘Diversity Concept’ based on Learning and Working Styles, I have come to the conclusion that there is another aspect to it once we move from teacher-driven approaches to student or learner-centered strategies. These are always driven by students’ personal learning needs based on profound self-knowledge, leading to independent learning behavior.
Now the definition becomes quite clear: personalization means, encouraging learners to select learning strategies which match their style preferences, allowing them to choose the time frame and offering a wide range of different methods and resources. All these choices are based on the results of their LSA profiles and if the frame work is diverse enough, trainers/teachers/instructors are in the position to let trainees/students/employees learn in their own personal way, driven by inner motivation as well as enjoying the learning process. A big component in making learning personal and sustainable is self-responsibility which is especially effective among adult learners. MicroLearning could take advantage of this positive situation by offering personalized small learning sequences incorporating the learner’s individual learning preferences, particularly in the sensory modalities (visual – auditory – tactile –kinesthetic) which are the basis for information intake and memorizing new content. Through this enhancement learners could reach the desired end result in their own way - going beyond individual learning speed and creating long-term memory and sustainable knowledge.
