If you’re not enthusiastic about work lately, you’re not alone. According to Gallup, less than one-third of U.S. workers are engaged—the lowest point of employee engagement in nearly a decade.
This drop isn’t surprising, given reports of increasing stress levels, financial uncertainty, and the always-on culture of the digital age. And while several studies concluded that working to foster a more creative workplace can also boost employee engagement, the past few years have shown that creativity can be a hard sell.
Many employees aren’t interested in pursuing creativity because they don’t see it as relevant to their jobs—particularly if they aren’t working in a traditionally creative industry or role. Meanwhile, some leaders view creativity training as extraneous to productivity and not worth their limited budget (despite its incredible power in driving innovation and solving complex problems).
Fortunately, according to research, there’s a way to enhance creativity (and thus employee engagement) without even uttering the term creativity. As it turns out, curiosity is a powerful gateway for creativity and is proving to be a key to re-engaging the workforce.
How do you deal with problems and challenges at work? In my experience as a researcher, consultant, and strategist, your answer to this question likely correlates directly with how engaged at work you are.
Here are five common responses: 1) Ignore the problem because that problem is not your problem. 2) Ignore the problem because you don’t have the energy to face it. 3) Complain about it to a co-worker or friend and blame someone. 4) Complain about it to a manager, business owner, or company. 5) Face it, define it, and get curious about your part in seeking a solution that is both novel and useful.
Those five responses reflect a spectrum of engagement with no. 1 being the lowest engagement and no. 4, the highest. Your willingness to face a problem at work and get curious about seeking a novel and useful solution is, by definition, creativity at work.
I've observed an operative correlation in our workplace Wonder Interventions at Work training. When we work with teams to foster curiosity, employees in general become more caring and a little less complaining. Their actions and self-reporting show that they care more about one another as well as about their shared work aims. Overall, we witnessed team members assume more agency as they become more proactive problem-solvers and problem-trackers and less reactive problem-complainers.
A 2023 study published in Current Psychology shows our findings aren’t an isolated experience—curiosity enhances both our ability to generate new ideas and our creativity.
This study echoes the results of a 2019 study, which showed that curiosity fuels creativity through idea linking—a cognitive process in which we use aspects of our early ideas as input for subsequent ideas. In other words, one idea is a stepping stone to the next.
As I recently discussed in an article about sustaining creativity in dark times, creativity isn’t just fuel for poets and painters—it’s an evolutionary advantage that helps us solve complex problems. And creativity at work is the set of skills by which one can generate and act upon novel and useful solutions to meaningful problems.
For example, if an employee identifies problems with communication dynamics, the way meetings are conducted, or a sales strategy, and then works to find solutions to that problem, that person is by definition exercising creativity.
Unfortunately, people don’t always realize they’re using creativity when they’re in problem-solving mode, so they may not consider it a valuable skill to hone. And when employees don’t see themselves as creative, they’re unlikely to be interested in creativity training. However, focusing on curiosity helps achieve the same results and is something more leaders and workers may be willing to prioritize.
Curiosity opens us up to pursue new and relevant knowledge and to new possibilities. By creating a culture that ignites curiosity, employees often experience the benefits of increased creativity, helping them connect more deeply with their work, work proactively to tackle problems, and feel more fulfilled in doing so.
Leaders, on the other hand, will benefit from a more engaged workforce, which can translate into increased productivity, lower turnover, and an uptick in employee satisfaction.
Curiosity is relatively easy to cultivate in the workplace because it’s a fundamental human trait, though it does require consistent practice.
Here are a few ways to nurture curiosity at work:
When curiosity becomes an integral part of a team's or organization’s culture, it also becomes the default approach to facing and finessing problems, building strategies, and collaborating with others. Additionally, by bringing curiosity to daily interactions, leaders inadvertently foster creativity while making work a more enjoyable and engaging experience for all.
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References
Davis, Jeffrey. "Empathic Curiosity: Where's Your Attention?" Psychology Today, 28 March 2023.
Hagtvedt, Lydia Paine, Karyn Dossinger, Spencer H. Harrison, and Li Huang. "Curiosity made the cat more creative: Specific curiosity as a driver of creativity." (January 2019). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (150: 1-13).
Harter, Jim. "Disengagement Persists Among American Employees." Gallup.com. 25 April 2022. Gallup 2022 Q12 Survey.
Zada, M., Khan, J., Saeed, I. et al. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it has the power to improve employee creativity. Current Psychology, 42, 32299–32313 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04171-y
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