It might come as a surprise based on my job title, but I would generally consider myself an introvert.
I don’t mean in the stereotypical sense of avoiding people or shying away from interaction; as a senior consultant, a lot of my job involves facilitating workshops, presenting to clients, and leading discussions.
But when it comes to how I naturally process information, I’d generally say I’m more likely to reflect before responding, listen quietly before contributing, and work through ideas on my own before sharing them.
For that reason, I was particularly interested in the findings from Personality at Work —our new report produced in collaboration with the IOIC and The Introvert Space.
Using data from 5,000 UK workers, we explored how personality traits (tending toward introversion or extroversion) might explain why internal communications are experienced differently by different people.
For years, organizations have become increasingly sophisticated in how they think about audiences. Nowadays, communications are regularly tailored for different business units, functions, locations, and demographic groups.
Meanwhile, employee experience teams will often analyze data through multiple demographic filters to better understand how different segments of the employee population experience work.
Personality, however, is a lens that has received relatively little attention. Yet it may help further explain something many communicators and employee experience professionals recognize instinctively: the same message, delivered through the same channel and at the same time, can still land very differently at an individual level.
One of the findings that stood out most to me related to relevance. Introverts were significantly less likely to say that communications from their employer felt relevant to them, and less likely to feel that internal communications featured people like them.
That finding resonated with me. Often, in organizations, the people who get the most airtime are those who are most comfortable taking it and most willing to put themselves out there. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it can create a narrow picture of what contribution looks like.
In reality, some people share through energetic discussion and visible leadership, while others contribute through thoughtful analysis, quiet influence, and consistently delivering results; and both styles are equally valuable.
Yet internal communications can sometimes over-index on the most visible personalities, making it harder for those with different styles to see themselves reflected in the stories being told.
The report’s findings on employee voice also highlight how personality impacts experience.
Introverts reported lower levels of psychological safety and were less likely to use most organizational feedback channels. The largest differences appeared in public or real-time mechanisms such as forums, Q&As, and social platforms. Surveys, meanwhile, showed much more balanced levels of participation.
That raises an interesting question for organizations: when we talk about listening to employees, who are we actually hearing from?
Many organizations invest heavily in town halls, leadership Q&As, social commenting tools, and other forms of open dialogue, and these channels are indisputably valuable and play an important role in building connection. But they may also be slightly better suited to people who are comfortable sharing views publicly and spontaneously.
That doesn’t mean those perspectives are any less important, but it does mean they may not represent the full picture. From an employee experience perspective, one of the biggest risks in any listening strategy is assuming that visible participation equates to representative participation.
Some people are naturally inclined to speak up in the moment, while others prefer time to reflect before sharing their views. If we only design listening mechanisms for the first group, we risk missing insights from the second.
More broadly, I think that’s the real lesson from this research. It’s not that organizations should communicate differently to introverts and extroverts (and, in fact, segmenting by personality type would be very difficult to do practically).
Nor is it that one group has a better or worse experience than the other. Rather, it’s that communication works best when it recognizes that people engage differently.
In practice, that might mean combining live discussions with written follow-up comms; providing opportunities for immediate input alongside more reflective forms of feedback; balancing interactive events with content that can be consumed in an individual’s own time; and designing listening strategies that aim to capture both the louder voices and the quieter ones.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t to design communication around labels like personality types. The goal is to create communication environments where different styles of thinking, processing, and contributing can all be successful.
The more we recognize that employees will engage with communication in different ways, the better equipped we’ll be to create experiences that genuinely work for a broad range of people.