Why Tom Haak sees the personal user guide as an HR trend

On 16 February 2021, a video appeared with a question that sounds almost too simple: “Do you have a Personal User Guide?” Tom Haak of the HR Trend Institute and Natal Dank of PXO Culture sit opposite each other. There is no stage and no grand story about the future. They discuss something practical: what if people had a short set of instructions explaining how to work with them well?

Their own guides make the idea tangible straight away. Read the Personal User Guide of Tom Haak and the Personal User Guide of Natal Dank.

Haak had recently included the personal user guide in his overview of important HR trends. He saw a move towards more personalisation. Not everyone needs the same support, meeting or amount of freedom. A guide makes those differences visible earlier, so colleagues do not have to spend months guessing.

That idea is still relevant five years later. Hybrid work has removed many everyday signals from collaboration. A colleague who once walked over to your desk now sends a short message. Someone who needs silence to think may appear absent during a video call. Someone who likes to coordinate quickly may sound impatient in writing. The question is therefore not only whether you know each other. It is whether you know what the other person needs when work becomes tense, unclear or fast.

A guide replaces months of guessing

Haak summarises the purpose clearly. A personal user guide helps other people understand how best to deal with you, and helps you do the same for them. In the accompanying HR Trend Institute publication, he names ten possible benefits. They include setting clear expectations, reaching meaningful conversations faster, making weaknesses discussable, becoming more predictable and showing respect for who a colleague is.

That list centres on one problem: much of what we know about collaboration only becomes clear after something has gone wrong.

You discover that your manager wants to be left alone in the morning after three early messages go unanswered. You notice that a colleague can only give useful feedback when they see the question in advance, after a meeting has already stalled. You learn that someone likes to develop an early idea together, after you have judged their half-finished plan as careless.

People eventually learn these things. Along the way, however, teams pay with irritation, repair conversations and lost time. A personal guide brings some of that learning forward. It does not predict every problem. It simply puts the most important instructions into words early.

That is also why the word guide works. It makes the question small and concrete. Not: who are you deep down? Instead: how can I work well with you?

Clarity is not the same as treating everyone alike

Haak places the guide within a broader move towards personalisation. That sounds obvious, but organisations still confuse clarity with one fixed way of working for everyone.

A meeting always starts with people calling out ideas. Feedback is given spontaneously because directness is considered important. A project gets a tight plan because predictability is supposed to be comfortable. These agreements may work well, but never for everyone at the same time.

Our previously published analysis of 2,705 personality profiles shows how much variation exists. The full study is in that article. Here we only use preferences around planning and contact, because they connect directly to the work situations Haak and Dank discuss. Demo profiles were excluded. We only show groups of at least fifty people and round percentages to whole numbers.

Flexible19%Methodical35%Focused46%

Quiet25%Merry40%Dominant36%

No preference has one standard that applies to almost everyone. Consider contact during a meeting. A quarter of the profiles are quiet, 40% are merry and 36% are dominant. A team that measures involvement by who speaks most often will therefore overlook a substantial group.

There is no universal approach to planning either. 19% are flexible, 35% are methodical and 46% are focused. A focused colleague may feel calmer when there is an early deadline and a clear owner. A flexible colleague may do their best work when there is room to respond to new information along the way.

This is not an argument for fifteen work processes in every team. It is an argument against automatically taking yourself as the norm. Clarity means that people know what to expect. That can require different agreements.

Trust does not start with sharing everything

Transparency, authenticity and trust appear several times in Haak's list. That requires a caveat. A personal guide is not an invitation to share your entire private life with colleagues. Honest sharing only works when people decide for themselves what is relevant and safe to tell.

Useful information concerns observable behaviour at work:

• “When I am quiet in a meeting, I am usually still thinking.”
• “When you give me feedback, start with the desired result and then give me the details.”
• “I like to discuss a new direction early, before everything has been worked out.”
• “Under time pressure, I sound more abrupt than I intend.”
• “Once a decision is final, I want to know who records it and when we will revisit it.”

These sentences make behaviour more predictable without fixing someone in place. They help another person read your intention more accurately. That is an important distinction. A guide does not say: this is just how I am. It says: this often happens, this is how it may be misread and this is how we can handle it.

A personal guide must therefore be reciprocal. If only the manager explains how other people should adapt, it is not a collaboration tool but a list of instructions. Its value appears when everyone shares something, everyone may ask questions and agreements can change.

The best guide includes friction

Haak also mentions sharing weaknesses. That may be the hardest part. People like to write that they are results-oriented, have high standards or bring lots of ideas. Those phrases sound positive, but they tell a colleague little about the moment when collaboration becomes difficult.

A useful guide shows the downside too:

I am focused and like to make a plan early. As a result, I can dismiss a new possibility as a distraction too quickly. If you want to change something, help me by keeping the goal the same and explaining what the new route will achieve.

Or:

I am quiet and do not always produce my best answer immediately in a fast conversation. Send me the key question in advance and give me room to add something later.

Writing this takes more honesty than listing strengths. At the same time, it is kinder because it explains behaviour without excusing it. You name what the other person may notice and what you will do yourself.

To make that practical, use three fixed questions:

1. What behaviour do other people see from me when things are going well?
2. How might the same behaviour be misread under pressure?
3. What small agreement will help both of us?

The answers often fit on one page. That matches the original idea that The New York Times also wrote about: a short guide can help new colleagues understand sooner what they would otherwise only discover over time.

What the video and the data do not prove

The video shows why Haak and Dank are enthusiastic. The platform analysis shows that work preferences vary widely. Together, they make it plausible that explicit agreements can be useful. They do not prove that a personal guide automatically creates trust, speed or better performance.

To establish that, you would need to follow teams before and after introducing guides, make a clear comparison and agree on what to measure. We do not have those data here. The 2,705 profiles are not representative of all working people either. They come from people who completed a profile on Personal User Guide themselves.

The data also do not tell us why someone made a guide. The current overview does not reliably show whether the purpose was work, family, sports, dating and relationships or personal development. We therefore do not compare those contexts.

That limitation does not reduce the practical insight. It keeps it precise. We know that preferences differ. We know that many of those differences become visible in everyday behaviour. And we know that people often discuss them only after friction has already occurred.

Start with one misunderstanding, not five pages

The question in the video does not need to become a major HR project. Choose one recurring misunderstanding. Perhaps your colleague thinks you are quiet because you are not involved. Perhaps someone experiences your need for a plan as control. Perhaps you see a quick change of direction as chaos, while the other person is trying to leave room for new information.

Write three lines about it:

• This is what you often see me do.
• This is how it may be misread.
• This is what we can agree.

Discuss those lines with the person who actually experiences the behaviour. Do not only ask whether the text is correct. Ask what is still missing. That turns self-knowledge into shared knowledge.

Tom Haak saw the personal user guide as a form of personalisation in HR. The platform data show why that is not a luxury: substantial groups work from different preferences around planning and contact. There is no single normal way to collaborate.

You do not have to wait for an organisation to introduce it. You can create your own personal user manual, raise one misunderstanding sooner and start today.