Does the workday leave us room to be curious?

Curiosity is one of the workplace’s most undervalued asset. It is the mental itch that drives discovery and question probing, allowing employees to explore potential opportunities for innovation. Yet, today’s technology has learned to hijack our capacity to be curious – through immediate AI shortcuts, doomscrolling on social platforms and a culture that rewards speed over contemplation, we’ve built a workplace that is exceptionally good at sparking curiosity, but increasingly bad at letting it progress into anything meaningful.

It isn’t because employees have stopped asking questions, it’s because they are often asking those questions to machines or AI colleagues – which tend to offer immediate answers and reduce time spent ruminating offer possible scenarios and fresh ideas. So in the age of AI, what does it mean to be curious in the workplace?

A new SurveyMonkey ‘State of Curiosity’ report surveying nearly 2,000 US workers reveals that curious people tend to get more out of caring about their jobs. Highly curious employees take on challenging work at almost three times the rate of their less curious peers and are twice as likely to say they’re advancing at the pace they want. The report links this to self-efficacy, a person’s belief that they can pull off the task in front of them, and finds that the more curious someone is, the more time they spend on a task and the more they push through when it gets difficult.

The three forces pulling curiosity out of work

The report identifies three things pulling curiosity out of the modern workplace. The first is the ‘AI middleman’, leaders asking a chatbot a question instead of asking the person next to them, at nearly three times the rate of their own teams. The second is the ‘scroll reflex’, a habit borrowed from social media that trains people to take the first answer rather than dig deeper for a better one. The third, and the one with the most straightforward fix, is the ‘efficiency squeeze’, where a shorter time to complete a task is seen as efficient.

When speed squeezes curiosity

Speed has become the thing management rewards, and that has left curiosity nowhere to live in the working day. Only 38% of workers say their meetings are genuinely open discussion rather than status updates or information that could have been an email. In workplaces where questions are actively discouraged, that number drops to 15%. More than half of workers say simply having more unstructured time would help them be more curious, they already have identified the problem, just haven’t been given the room to fix it. The cost shows up after the fact. Half of workers say they’ve had to redo work because the right questions weren’t asked in the first place.

Rebuilding the curiosity capacity

Workers were asked what would help them rebuild their curiosity. More than three-quarters want more chances to brainstorm with colleagues, making it the most requested fix in the whole survey, and one of the cheapest for any workplace to implement.

Seven in ten want more psychological safety to ask questions without it counting against them, mostly evident in workplaces where questions are actively discouraged; only 41% of people feel safe asking one, compared with 94% where they’re encouraged.

Six in ten want more contact across teams, not just within their own, since the casual, low-stakes conversations with people outside your immediate group are often where the best ideas actually come from.

None of these are expensive changes. They’re closer to permission than investment, and the report’s overall message is that leaders set the tone here. Executives are three times as likely as individual contributors to accept an AI answer without checking it, and nearly one in three would rather test an idea with AI than with someone on their team. If leaders want their people to ask more questions, modelling that behaviour themselves is the starting point.

Testing assumptions

One example of asking sharper questions in practice comes from art supplier Sakura, a company that has been in business for more than a century. Its American arm had ambitious growth targets and a common problem for any multinational. The product development sat in Japan, but the customers buying the products in North America were not all Japanese. Rather than debate assumptions in a meeting room, the Sakura team tested them. When they suspected US customers would see a $100 pen as too expensive, instead of simply arguing the point internally, they went and asked. The data backed up the hunch. That shift, from ‘we don’t think this will work’ to ‘here’s why it won’t work, and here’s the evidence,’ is what asking sharper questions looks like in practice.

None of this needs AI or a bigger budget to fix, just a workplace willing to give curiosity somewhere to live. That starts with leaders modelling the behaviour they want to see, and trusting that a question asked out loud is rarely time wasted.

Read the full SurveyMonkey report here.