Born of necessity
In 2016 Paul Finch had completed a company turnaround and exited a technology business securing value for all shareholders, but it had been a hard journey. This coincided with the rise in the media surrounding the conversation on mental wellbeing.
On the back of his own personal business journey as senior leader, Paul commissioned an independent psychologist in Jan 2017 to help resolve the challenge:
Is it possible to create a psychometric tool to surface all the hidden sources of stress within an organisation to create a digital heatmap allowing senior leaders to implement targeted support
Paul Finch
Paul is a co-founder of APeopleBusiness. It is his vision that is the driving force behind the core product of StressFactor™.
Developed with Psychologists
Paul has spent 3+ years creating and automating the product working with a number of psychologists, refining the research and running pilot projects across a number of organisations.
The tool has evolved and incorporates some key thinking drawn from many different sources of knowledge and expertise including the UK Health & Safety Exec.
StressFactor™ Validation
StressFactor is made of two core components:
> DiSC Personality Profiling Psychometric Tool
> Stress and Mental Health Questions
What is DiSC ?
DiSC was founded by William Moulton Marston, an American psychologist who invented an early prototype of the lie detector, a self-help author and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.
Marston’s Emotions of Normal People, published in 1928 presented his findings on the concepts of will and a person’s sense of power and their effect on personality and human behaviour.
DiSC came, by design, from Marston’s search for measurements of the energy of behaviour and consciousness.
Although, Marston did not develop an assessment or test from his model, as others later did. He did, interestingly, apply his model and theory in the real world when he consulted with Universal Studios in 1930 to help them transition from melodramatic silent pictures to movies with audio and the need for more natural gestures and facial expression by actors.
DISC is still one of the most widely used psychometric personality profiling tools in the world.
Carl Gustav Jung originated attributed personality to internal influences, Jung determined that our behaviour is based on the way we think and process. He contributed much to the understanding of “type” behaviours, believing that individuals had a “Psychological Type” and that people vary by how they perceive things and make decisions.
In 1921, Jung published the book, Psychological Types, identifying 4 ways in which we experience the world: Sensation, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking. He is credited with the creation of the word ‘introvert’ and, subsequently ‘extrovert’ which are key elements in the two-axis matrix which supports the DISC tool.
DiSC has been reviewed in various forms by the BPS (British Psychological Society) and has a number of validation papers to its name and various other renamed identical tools.
StressFactor Questions
The survey questions have been drawn from the experience of three organisational psychologists as a direct result of their industry experience and practice over many years. These three make up the APeopleBusiness Psychology Advisory Board.
Integrated Question Sources:
StressFactor™ has recently been reviewed against the ISO 45001 and PAS 3002 standards.