Boost employee engagement by cultivating curiosity

Curiosity impacts business at every level. The more your employees are curious about customers and the people your organization serves – about how your business does its business — the more engaged they’ll become.

Engaged employees are curious about why your customers and clients do things, don’t do things, ask for things, buy from us, work with us, use our services or another’s.

It’s not just the job of sales or customer-facing operations – it’s everyone’s responsibility. Curiosity is a naturally occurring human driver that, when properly managed, can help us come out stronger post COVID-19.

Stress, like curiosity, is linked to cortisol, a hormone released under stressful conditions.  A little bit makes us curious, too much we retreat. Finding the right balance is essential.

Define reality

Successful business leaders define current reality and communicate it to their organization. People want to know – for better or worse.

In a study done by the Pew Research Center, people were asked, “Do you feel better knowing, even if it’s bad?” A full 85% said ‘yes.’

A survey by Bain & Co. found a typical professional spends:

• 45% of the time in meetings
• 23% on emails
• 18% doing ‘unproductive’ work
• 14% on the work itself.

Something’s got to give

It’s way past time to create the time and bandwidth for people to be curious. We need time to experiment, learn from what worked (and what didn’t) and try again. But that will require change.

To have the capacity to be curious we have to change and stop doing so many things. One of the biggest challenges to encouraging curiosity is to set aside the time to connect with others, learn, reflect on what worked – we have to give back time.

If we spend our days glued to Zoom calls, busy being busy, there’s no time to think and be curious. We may be super busy but we’re not super productive. And burnout is right around the corner.

5 minutes to reflect

There’s an old saying, “We never find time to do things right; we always find time to do things twice.”

GOLD is a simple framework I created for reflective conversation that encourages curiosity in less than five minutes, ideal for todays’ “busyness.” GOLD stands for:
Goal
Outcome
Learn
Do

The power lies in the questions that allow the other person to reflect  on what they were trying to do (the goal) , what they achieved (the outcome), what they learned from that (creating more curiosity) and what, with hindsight they would do differently (accountability).  In less than five minutes we’ve created more curiosity.

Unleash the ‘secret army’

Every organization has, what I call, a ‘secret army’ – people who, every day, are in contact with customers or service users. They’re responding to queries, resolving technical issues, providing care, chasing payments, delivering goods, supporting the frontline. What they share – whatever their title – is their connection with customers and clients.

It’s important to help these people be more curious and to serve (not sell) better. Reframe ‘selling’ for what it really is, being curious enough to help people solve a problem and want to work with us, buy from us and recommend us, we unleash more potential. In a post-COVID world, referrals will be the lifeblood of business. 

Mindset, toolset, skillset

To unleash the potential of your ‘secret army’ it pays to encourage employees to want to discover more. What happened? Why? How can we do things differently next time?

Provide the tools and techniques that make it easier to be curious. Think of it as a recipe book – can’t cook or won’t cook? Open the mind to trying to cook and provide recipes that people can try out and make their own.

Equip your secret army with a curiosity toolset and help them open up conversations and discussions in ways that will lead to opportunities for growth.  The more they use the tools the more skilled – and more curious – they become.

Virtual training

All these tools can be shared through webinars, Zoom or Teams in bite sized ways – whether people are WFH or transitioning back.

Not long ago, a curious thing happened to me. A delegate on our Natural Business Development program, who happens to be a self-acknowledged introvert, said he felt much safer doing role playing on Zoom than he ever did face to face.

“How come?” I asked. He said the physical distance created by Zoom eased his sense of inferiority or inadequacy. He felt safer, and that’s all he needed to come out of his shell a bit more. It is likely we’ll find virtual training may be more effective than we originally hoped.

Challenge the status quo

With a curious mindset and a toolset in hand, we enable people to try new things, give and receive feedback and embed the skills. As skill and confidence grow, we achieve more and we feel less stressed.

What’s not to like?

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner authors of The Leadership Challenge demonstrated this with their 5 Practices of Exemplary Leadership.

One of those – Enable Others To Act – is all about fostering collaboration and building trust.  Another, Challenge the Process, shows the importance of experimenting, trying out new and different ways of working and learning from the inevitable mistakes along the way.  That’s curiosity in action.

It pays when leaders challenge the process, encourage reflection and give feedback every day.

To cultivate more curiosity, we must create a context where we have the time and capacity to be curious.

It’s essential to recognize curiosity for the superpower it really is and actively reward it when we see it.  And we need to equip our people with tools to make that a reality.