It follows, then, that the best way to maximize our output in a WFH environment is to better know our personalities—and those of our dispersed colleagues.

An efficient (and intriguing) way to manage this personality wrangling is via the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI is widely applied within the business world, with 89 of the Fortune 100 companies utilizing it.

MBTI at work

"The MBTI is deceptively simple, but it's also an extremely useful way to see how team members are inherently different, and how you can work together more successfully," says occupational psychologist John Hackston, Head of Thought Leadership at the Myers-Briggs Company. "It's a means to boost productivity in people, increasing their engagement and making them generally happier in their work."

In other words, the MBTI might just be the key to turning your remote team into a smooth autonomous unit.

What are the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types?

Based on Carl Jung's Theory of Psychological Types, the MBTI is a self-reported personality survey that has been around in various shapes and forms since the 1940s. Respondents answer a series of simple questions about their feelings and preferences, eventually aligning with one of 16 personality types.

Each of these types is identified by four letters, starting with an E or an I (for extrovert/introvert) followed by S or N (sensibility/intuition), T or F (thinking/feeling), and finally a J or a P (judgment/perception). Each type also has a descriptor, e.g., "the analyst," to further characterize the personality type in action.

Once you know your team members' types, the thinking goes, you can better assign them to projects which match their preferences, proficiency, and proclivities. You can also communicate more effectively if you have a better idea of how people process information.

ISTJ: responsible realists

The Logistician: Who they are: dutiful doers who appreciate clarity, love routines, and believe in values like honor, hard work and social responsibility. They're quiet, reserved and reliable. The Queen of England is an archetypal ISTJ.

How to work with them: "This personality type is incredibly well organized, which is a major asset in a remote working environment," says psychologist and business coach Rosie Peacock, CEO of Conscious Enterprise. "They don't need much management or checking up on, just email them a to-do list at the start of the week, and you can trust them to quietly get on with it. They'd also be the perfect type to organize and streamline any shared space online, from Dropbox to Google Docs."

INFJ: insightful visionaries

The Advocate: Who they are: Principled creatives who are quietly forceful but also intuitive about people and concerned about their colleagues' feelings. They tend to be deep thinkers with bags of ideas.

How to work with them: "The entire hiring process is considerably more difficult in a remote world, but Advocates can be an ace up your sleeve," says Peacock. "They tend to be excellent judges of character, so it would be a major asset to have them sit in on virtual interviews. Just don't put them center stage in any Zoom meetings if you can avoid it: they don't thrive on attention, and work far better behind the scenes."

INTJ: conceptual planners

The Architect: Who they are: Perfectionist innovators who are comfortable alone and thrive in a remote work environment. People with this personality type are natural problem solvers who are great at taking an idea and turning it into a plan of action. They're a dual threat: skilled at both intuitive and practical thinking.

How to work with them: "This group is usually more comfortable communicating by text, so they'll often need to be nudged into picking up the phone or jumping on a Zoom call when it's more beneficial," says Hackston of the Myers-Briggs Company. "They're extremely deadline-focused, but there's also a danger they can rush to hasty decisions, particularly without colleagues nearby to check their impulses. Sometimes INTJs need to be reminded to stop for a second, take their time, and let ideas germinate, rather than just rushing straight at them."

ISFJ: practical helpers

The Defender: Who they are: The most extroverted of the introverts, ISFJs prioritise harmony and co-operation, have a strong work ethic, and are sensitive to colleagues' wishes and feelings. But there is steel behind their zeal: they tend to be extremely conscientious workers who are natural managers, capable of keeping remote teams bonded and happy.

How to work with them: "ISFJs display incredible attention to detail, so they're great for checking over others' work, editing shared documents or looking overpitches and proposals at the final stage," says Peacock. "They're also very good at following rules and inspiring others to do the same, so put them in charge of any time tracking software you use - and watch them increase the efficiency of the entire team."

ISTP: logical pragmatists

The Virtuoso: Who they are: These are direct, to-the-point characters, loyal to their peers but not overly concerned with laws and rules. ISTPs are the most unpredictable of the 16 personality types, because they're typically rational and logical, but can also be enthusiastic and spontaneous.

How to work with them: Virtuosos will likely feel the impact of missed day-to-day interactions with their teams most of all, so they'll benefit from scheduled one-on-one digital meetings to maintain drive and focus. "ISTPs tend to excel at troubleshooting, so in a remote work environment they can be a major tech asset," says Peacock. "They're very good at test driving new tools and navigating software, but they also lose focus easily. They're the team member most likely to turn off their camera in a meeting, open another window and start surfing the net - so they do need to be managed."

ISFP: versatile supporters

The Adventurer: Who they are: Sensitive doers who thrive when creating for others, Adventurers are warm, approachable, friendly and averse to confrontation. They also see the value of exploring new things and discovering new experiences.

How to work with them: "This group like to live in the moment and can become completely wrapped up in their work," says Peacock. "Working from home and without colleagues physically monitoring them, they can burn out quite easily, so need to be reminded to take an hour for lunch and finish the working day at a reasonable time. Their energy is an asset, but it sometimes needs to be harnessed and directed in the right direction by others."

INFP: thoughtful idealists

The Mediator: Who they are: Laidback idea-people with a well-developed value system, INFPs can often get lost in their imaginations and daydreams. While they bring intensity and enthusiasm to projects, they often find it challenging to sustain their excitement for long periods of time.

How to work with them: "This type tends to have very deep-seated values, which can cause problems because frustrations can stew when they're offended," says Hackston. "This is amplified when working remotely as grievances can linger for longer, so managers need to encourage them to get any concerns out into the open. Otherwise, the key to getting the best out of this group is to encourage and reinforce meaning in their work." In other words, if their projects align with their values, this group can be an unstoppable force.

INTP: objective analysts

The Logician: Who they are: Renegade problem solvers who love patterns, are quick to notice discrepancies, and cherish competence and logic. They thrive off being alone and will enjoy lockdown more than any other type. Albert Einstein is the archetypal INTP.

How to work with them: "This type really needs to be given the freedom to do things in an original way, and to be listened to, because they come up with the smartest solutions," says Peacock.

"Their weak spot is that they often neglect to share decisions and solutions, and that trait can become even more pronounced when working from home," adds Hackston. If there's an INTP on your team, encourage them to use shared documents and software as much as possible. A tool like Confluence, for example, would be ideal. Continue reading

• Jonathan Thompson is a contributing writer at "Work Life."

Will Hutton and Matthew Taylor told a Catholic social teaching conference that there were dangers from keeping people working from home even after lockdown ends. There was a risk of the social support and solidarity that work brings being lost.

"People want to be in groups and workplaces, but entrepreneurs and investors want highly atomised workforces," Taylor told the Zoom conference, organised by St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill.

Hutton agreed that "workplaces are social, they are good for morale, and they are where ideas are generated." "Working from home should be part of the working world in the future, but it should not frame it."

Research has shown almost all of the UK's top employers have said they do not plan to bring their staff back to the office full time.

A BBC poll of 50 of the UK's largest employers, collectively employing 1.1 million people, found that 43 firms said they planned to use a mixture of home and remote working going forward.

Jamie Mackenzie, director at Sodexo Engage, said it was no surprise to see businesses move towards a hybrid model.

"The world has changed, and therefore working policies need to evolve with it," he said, arguing that employers now needed to do more to engage their workforce if they wanted to remain competitive.

However, Clare Kelliher, professor of work and organisation at Cranfield School of Management, urged businesses not to rush to remove access to workplaces.

While it was positive that businesses were exploring ways to maintain this form of flexible working as lockdown restrictions eased, she said some employees' experiences of remote working made them keener than others to return to the office.

"If some remote working becomes enforced, rather than chosen by employees, it is likely that the many positive benefits available to employers from offering flexible working will not materialise," she said.

Sources

• The Tablet
• People Management

Less than two weeks after I moved the majority of my things across New York City, I found myself occupying a new, though by now not unfamiliar, apartment.

Thanks to the restrictions of the lockdown, the geography of the place soon doubled as the contours of my entire physical world.

My idea of home — already, as someone who grew up a "third culture kid" and spent most of her 20s in transit as a travel writer, an ambiguous one — was transformed.

On the one hand, life has narrowed drastically. As bars and restaurants and businesses shuttered around us, as our streets emptied, as the decision to go for a walk or pick up a prescription or stop into a bodega for milk took on outsized weight, we have developed a routine characterized, in part, by seeming placelessness: a life that, but for our occasional grocery runs, could very well not be taking place in New York, a city that once for me was synonymous with being outside.

We cook. We bake. We work from home, writing side by side at the dining table.

We drink wine — rather too much of it in recent days.

We try to exercise with a set of sliders and a pair of weights.

Except for the constant fear of what the future might hold and the uncanny habits we've developed — wearing plastic gloves outside, using our sleeves to touch the elevator buttons — our day-to-day life feels strangely ordinary.

That placelessness, though, has fostered a different, though less instinctive, kind of rootedness.

We organize online classes, cocktail hours, play readings or "dinner dates."

We coordinate barre video workouts with friends and invite those who live in Paris or New Haven or California to drink a cocktail with us.

We watch our parish church's recorded prayers and services.

We video-chat with our parents: one set across the country, the other across the world.

As millennials, we as a generation are often accused of a certain moral and aesthetic rootlessness.

We order our household supplies from Amazon.

We read books on e-readers instead of physical copies bought from local bookshops.

The digital revolution has divorced place and people. Aided by increased internet speed the internet disembodies connection; our "tribes" are chosen.

But the fostering so many of us have done of online communities — through video-chatting platforms like Zoom, through cash apps like Venmo that allow us to tip our favourite bartenders or buy a video-chat session with a personal trainer — has revealed a different kind of rootedness: one based not in place, exactly, but in groups of people.

The more seemingly disembodied we become, the fewer links we have to our own geography, the more we become aware of the social bonds — of friendship, of chosen family, of affinity and care — that have come to define a different, but no less interdependent, notion of home.

I am a lifelong, proud New Yorker whose sense of being home has always been intertwined with place — in lieu of a gravesite, my grandmother has a memorial bench in Central Park and a plaque at her favourite restaurant; I take pride in the fact that the employees at my old bagel place know my breakfast order before I ask.

But I am more conscious now than ever that the digital revolution has divorced place and people.

Our sense of home is no less real for being diffuse.

The native lands that shape us are not necessarily those into which we are born — our hometowns, our birth parishes or synagogues or mosques, the communities we take as a given.

Increasingly, aided by the speed with which the internet makes disembodied connection possible, our "tribes" are chosen — people we meet through our hobbies, perhaps, or partners we find through dating apps (as 40%, annually, of couples who get together now do).

This is, of course, in part a disembodiment borne of privilege — our ability to stay indoors and to function with a degree of independence is predicated, in part, on the fact that my cohabitor and I have the kinds of jobs that allow for remote work.

But it also illustrates a broader truth about the boundaries between the "online" and the "offline" world, especially for millennials.

The rise of the "social distancing social life" makes it clearer than ever that a sense of place need not be physical. Home can be — and for now, must be — something you can experience through a webcam, darkly, if not always face to face.

• Tara Isabella Burton First Published in RNS. Republished with permission.