What’s Your Workplace Personality?

Among the many legacies of the pandemic is a new diversity in work arrangements.

If you want to work in an office five days a week, plenty of jobs still offer that schedule — or require it, in the cases of teachers, E.R. doctors and many blue-collar workers. If you want a hybrid work schedule, you no longer need special permission at many companies; it’s the norm. And if you prefer to work from home full time and maybe even live thousands of miles from your colleagues, you can find those jobs, too.

“Covid has opened our eyes to the fact that there are different ways in which we can work,” said David Noel, a human resources executive at Scotiabank, a Toronto-based bank with 90,000 employees. Partly for that reason, Scotiabank has begun to put more weight on personality tests, and less weight on résumés, when it makes hiring decisions.

In the post-pandemic era, personality tests seem to have a new relevance. They can help determine who will thrive in which work arrangements and what personality mix can maximize a team’s chance of success. Some advocates of the tests argue that they can also increase the diversity of a company’s work force by reducing the focus on standards that have traditionally benefited white men. Since Scotiabank began using personality tests more heavily in its campus hiring program, the share of its new employees who are Black has risen to 6 percent, from 1 percent.

My colleague Emma Goldberg, who covers the changing workplace, has written an in-depth article for our Sunday Business section about the new corporate interest in personality tests. In it, she traces their history back to World War I and grapples with some of their weaknesses.

Emma also collaborated with Aaron Krolik, a Times developer, to create a nine-question personality test based on her reporting. The test focuses on workplace dilemmas. “Two traits in particular play a powerful role in shaping workplace behavior: extroversion, the degree to which social interaction energizes someone, and openness, which refers to someone’s creativity and appetite for novel experiences,” Emma writes. “I designed the quiz with these traits in mind.”

I took the test this weekend and discovered that I’m a Break-Room Butterfly — which means I’m collaborative, prefer in-person work and have an easier time with pragmatic tasks than creative ones. That seems fair.

You can find out your type by playing along here.

NEWS

International

Politics

• Trump asked a federal judge to prevent Mike Pence from testifying to a grand jury.

• Fox News angered viewers after it correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020, prompting executives to question their decision.

• The self-help author Marianne Williamson announced her second presidential campaign and called President Biden “a weak choice.”

• The Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway and the conservative lawyer George Conway are divorcing.

Other Big Stories

FROM OPINION

• A “national divorce” breaking up red and blue states would dislocate millions of Americans and destabilize the globe, David French writes.

• Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary is bad for the country, bad for business and bad for democracy, says Michael Bloomberg.

• The back-stabbing depicted in “Tár” is all too real in classical music, John Mauceri, the film’s musical adviser, writes.

• More women have become the creative and economic force in their marriages. Still, the perfect wife ideal persists, Jessica Grose writes.

The Sunday question: Does it matter whether Covid leaked from a lab?

Covid’s origin matters for national security and public health, and investigating it pushes China to be more transparent, The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin writes. Yet we’ll probably never know the truth, says Vox’s Umair Irfan, and we can prepare for future pandemics without settling the debate.