On February 2nd, 2023, Tosin made a post on his internal work timeline; Hey guys. I just took this quiz, and it says my personality would be a goalkeeper if I were on a football team. Want to know what your personality says about you? Take the quiz here.

In under 3 hours, we had over 100 responses, the internal comms equivalent of a viral post. So how did this happen?

First off, who am I? My name is Celestina Dike (everyone calls me Celz, and you can too). I’m the Internal Communications manager at Moniepoint Inc., and if this is the first time you’ve heard about me, you’ve not been reading our blog, and I’m hurt.

At Moniepoint, we think of ourselves as a high-performance sports team, but it wasn’t always like this. We made a collective decision to create this narrative, and this is the story of how it happened.

It started with an idea.

In August 2022, Didi reached out to me. She’d had a conversation with our Head of People Operations, Naz, and they decided we needed to define our internal culture. “Culture” is thrown around everywhere in the corporate world, and we wanted to be different. We wanted a way to define exactly what we meant when we talked about the kind of culture we have at Moniepoint.

So, I had to work on a culture campaign.

But when this went live, how exactly would we get people to live the culture? It was one thing to say xxx was our culture, but what would make it memorable to every team member? How could this be engaging to them? I had my work cut out for me. 

As we defined this culture, one of the earliest conclusions was that we’re not a family. I’m sure you’ve heard us talk about this often. Instead, as we’ve described here, we think of ourselves as a sports team. This became the overarching metaphor for the process.

And we took it a step further. We weren’t going to be defined as just any sports team. Teams across different sports had different structures and dynamics.So, we picked the most popular sports in the world, one that our multicultural team across continents could relate with - football.

On a football team (soccer, if you’re American), everyone had defined roles, but this didn’t get in the way of accomplishing goals. Everyone on a football team knows what they’re there to do, and they do it. However, a striker would defend if that’s what the situation required. That’s the kind of synergy we were going for.

The Eureka Moment (or something like that).

I don’t really think of the point where I thought of the personality test as a Eureka moment, but I suppose it counts as one.

I had been brainstorming about the campaign, and the best way to get people to engage with it when I remembered the personality tests I loved to take online. I’ll be honest, no matter how busy I am, I’d always take the test whenever I come across them. “Take this test to find out what currency you are”? Sign me up!

Another important detail that made the personality test idea stand out from the rest of what I explored, was how immersive it would be. Beyond just communicating the culture, it could form a useful base for improving both inter and intra-team interactions.

So as we tried to figure out a way to kickstart the culture campaign, I suggested a personality test, and the team was on board with it.

The next thing Yemi (our creative director) and I had to do, was define the different personalities using a typical football team. We wanted to focus on just four so it wasn’t too complicated. In this way, it was also easier to connect it to existing personality models like the Hartman Personality Profile that’s based on 4 colours, and the four temperaments.

To connect these team roles to personality types, I reached out to one of our partners with experience in psychology and personality tests. With their help, we were able to create a model that helped identify each personality type.

We finally settled on a personality typing that connected the football roles to personality types on the colour wheel. Here’s how we categorised them;

Goalkeeper

What stands out when you think about a goalkeeper? For me, it’s making sure the ball doesn’t go into the net, and that means paying attention to details. On the colourwheel, the Goalkeeper’s personality is Blue. Like a goalkeeper, people with this personality are very detailed and have their eyes on the ball always. They ensure that nothing slips past them. In the work place, they are typically ​​structured, organised, functional, and formal.

Defender

The defender is a silent advocate for the team. They tend to be relaxed, friendly, and informal but pay close attention to and detail to tasks they’re assigned. Their personality colour is green, and when they’re on a team, they give their all to whatever tasks they’re assigned.

Midfielder

The midfielder is a collaborator. They have a vibrant personality coloured yellow, and they connect the team. They love project management and are amazing with bringing resources together to get a project done. They’re fast and spontaneous and help a team move forward.

Striker

For a quick picture, think Messi or Ronaldo. The striker is someone who is a goal-getter. They identify opportunities and take advantage of them in order to get the maximum results possible. Their personality colour is red. They are efficient and structured, and will typically be the first person to offer to take on tasks.

Design, Engineering, and tests

With the basic framework of the test in place, the next thing was creating the actual test. I had to meet with Adrian, our VP,  User Experience and Chidum, VP of Engineering,  to explain what we were trying to achieve. We then agreed on a process and flow for the project.

The test had three parts;

• The opening page with a basic explanation of the test and a place to fill in your name (or nickname).

• The test proper where you had to pick an option from a couple of questions

• The results page where you saw your personality type

Adrian’s team got to work with the designs, and while they were on it, I worked on the results page with Yemi and Olympio (brand designer).

At this point, even though we had everything we needed, the culture campaign couldn’t exactly go live yet. We were still called TeamApt, but not for long. I knew that we were going to change our name soon, and so I had to work with that as I crafted the campaign. The “culture book” we put together had Moniepoint branding, and so did the personality test we were putting together. This meant they could both only go out after the name change was official to avoid spilling the tea.

The process was on, and for now, I mostly had to wait.

Iterations

Personality test v1

I got the first version of the personality test from Chidum on the 28th of November. By then, they had not done the results page to share or download. This was the first iteration. You could only click the link, and go through the questions.

On review, the comms team settled on the fact that the pictures attached to the questions on the test didn’t work. I reselected the images and got back to have them changed. Luckily Chidum and I are best friends (or that’s what I like to believe). He created a group with the engineering team that made it easy for them and me to collaborate.

Personality test v2

By the 5th of December, they had redone it, and we realised that there was another problem - we couldn’t share the test via Workplace chat (our internal communication platform). We didn’t know if it was a feature or a bug. We had to fix that too.

Personality test v3

By the 8th of December, we decided that we had to personalise it further. The tests started with you putting in your nickname, and we wanted that nickname to feature at the end. So, we fixed the ending page to make the test come across as more personal. At this point, Chidum was making most of the changes himself, which I thought was really cool.

Personality test v- no longer counting

We also had text corrections to improve the clarity of the questions on the test. I reached out to the partner we had worked with earlier for clarification, and we adjusted it. But this created yet another problem.

With these adjustments, the algorithm got a little out of whack. The questions weren’t quite matching the results. On the first attempt of the quiz, everyone got a result they agreed with. But by the time we had made a couple of changes to improve the experience of the quiz, the results changed. As the code was being worked on, there was a mixup, and we had to correct that too.

3.. 2.. 1.. Liftoff 🚀

We made tweaks and adjustments right until the final day. On the night before, we added a copy at the beginning. There was also an issue with the quiz not working on some devices.

On the morning of “D-Day”, I met with Chidum and his team to explain the issue with the algorithm. We had tiny fixes with the grammar and many other tiny changes. We had a standard that we wanted this test to meet, and all hands were on deck to make it happen.

Soon, it had all come together, and we were ready to launch.

Tosin took the test and shared his result, and soon, the timeline was full. Everyone shared the results they got, and, interestingly, agreed that it reflected their personalities. By our next townhall, people were using the terms “striker, “defender”, and co, to describe themselves.

Lessons and takeaways

At the time that I started with this, I was just transitioning into my role as internal communications manager. This was somewhat unfamiliar territory, and the scale of the project also meant that it was more tasking than was typical. But with smooth cross-team collaboration, we were able to pull off something that got our multicultural team of almost a thousand (at the time) engaged. I was so excited that I tweeted about it.

Going through this process also made it easier to relate with my team, and this is something we’re extending to everyone else as well. With an idea of each other’s personalities and how it fits into our culture, collaboration is easier, and team members can work together more effectively. Culture becomes less of an undefinable thing floating in the ether, and becomes real to every one of us.

If you’d like to be part of a company where culture isn’t just a buzzword, click here to claim your spot.