…business can produce food, cure disease… employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these good things and make a profit without losing its soul.
Yvon Chouinard founder and owner, Patagonia
PeopleMaps believes it can change the world whilst retaining its soul. If you’re going to engage PeopleMaps in business, it should be important for you to understand our philosophies.
Affordable personality profiling for everyone
From the very beginning of PeopleMaps we believed that the people who benefit most from personality profiling systems are the people who are being profiled. Back at the turn of the millennium, there wasn’t much profiling on the internet, and most professional profiling systems cost a lot of money. We changed that – we prepared jobseekers for interviews by showing them what their employer was likely to read about them if they were asked to complete a ‘psychometric test’.
We then built an on-demand pay as you go system for businesses, with no minimum orders or set-up fees, which meant that even small companies could benefit from profiling, without forking out shed loads of cash.
Today’s Power Widget takes these principles one step further, and allows individuals and businesses to benefit from easy to use, instant, professional profiling content – and to share it with as many people as they like.
Location-independence and a global viewpoint
PeopleMaps lives on the interwebs. Our remote team works together using clever web technologies to keep in touch and we operate a meet-free policy. This allows the team to deliver PeopleMaps to you from anywhere in the world, with an eye to changing the world.
These two basics feed into our fully-encompassing philosophy we call …
Personality centric living
If we go way back to the beginning PeopleMaps was about accessibility: we wanted to make professional profiling accessible to all. We achieved this with our pricing and by writing in plain English, using no jargon. We also give away millions of reports for free, and we did that by being exclusively online.
As a philosophy, we believe that one should alter the environment to suit one’s individual personality, instead of bending the individual out of shape to suit the environment. This could be a work environment, a home environment, a romantic environment; it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that to be productive, to be inspired, to be happy, to be successful, to be at your best, you need to be operating in an environment compatible with your personality. We need the world to relate to us – and communicate with us in a personality centric way.
Is this unrealistic and idealistic? Surely its more unrealistic to hope that an entire workforce will conform to suit an employer’s environment – and still perform at their best?
People are not machines, so it’s time we stopped behaving as if they were. People use logic – but they are not logical, they are emotional. They are made up from that cocktail of introversion, extraversion, task and feeling and every one of them is complex and unique.
Of course the problem is complex but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it and hope that someday soon people will perform just like machines. No, there are two stages to this problem and most of us never even resolve stage one!
- What is my personality and what are my ideal environments?
- How can my environment be adapted to be more compatible with my personality?
If you look at any organisation you will see huge efforts going towards getting the people to adjust to the environment. Perhaps it would be easier the other way round? It would certainly be more productive!
PeopleMaps champions “personality centric living”, for it benefits everyone. On a personal level it shapes our opinions about work, about school and about pretty much everything. It should be the bedrock of all personal development, of all coaching, of all business development. We live in a world of one size fits nobody and we are all bent out of shape as a result.
And where does the internet come in to in all this?
The internet is changing our environment in a significant way. With the likes of Google we are being increasingly given a personalised experience – and increased choice. We no longer have to settle for one size, one colour, we can get it exactly the way we want it. This new world experience is on a collision course with the old world. Humans cannot be treated as unique in one world and treated like a machine in the other.
As an online profiling company PeopleMaps has unlimited facility to enable people to experience “personality centric living”. With an online technology and philosophy we can make professional profiling accessible to all and therefore “personality centric living” for all.
