Curiosity and Authenticity at Work

Being yourself and being curious are both highly sought-after employee attributes.

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• Curiosity is profoundly helpful in the workplace because it is synonymous with intense engagement.

• It enables workers to make fewer decision-making errors, reduces group conflict, and creates a better communication environment.

• Research shows that an environment conducive to authenticity in the workplace is conducive to greater productivity, a sense of belonging, and a decrease in stress amongst workers.

Personality traits are essential when deciding where you want to work as a potential employee, how you want to hire as an employer, and how you should manage your employees.   

This is because personality differences matter when it comes to fitness for a role. And by “fit,” this has no bearing on the employee’s performance but their happiness levels at a job. Being a fantastic coder but dreading it daily is an example of this.  

Curiosity and authenticity are potential symptoms of our personality that come to some of us more naturally than others, but can be actively cultivated and learned.  

Curiosity and authenticity are indispensable resources in the workplace in all settings. They drive productivity and trust, making for more accessible and streamlined working environments.   

Personality testing for employment is excessively invasive, so employers must adequately account for personality differences through understanding and engaging with their employees. 

Curiosity 

Curiosity is profoundly helpful in the workplace because it is synonymous with intense engagement. When you are engaged in your work, you feel good, and the quality of the work is much better than its non-engaged counterparts.  

Working when you are not engaged with your work is profoundly stressful, yet most workers feel as if they are not actively involved with it.  

Being open-minded is another good way to think about curiosity. Of course, taking constructive criticism seriously is crucial to success in any endeavor, but this requires a degree of open-mindedness. 

This is because curiosity diminishes confirmation bias, which is when we hold a belief and try to bolster it by looking for information that supports it instead of refuting it.   

The problem is we need to look at both to have an accurate picture of reality. And a total view of reality is necessary for a workplace to succeed. 

Curiosity is an indefinable asset to problem-solving because curious people are generally able to attack a problem in distinctive ways – without which often problems never get solved.  

Encouraging workers to be curious has been shown to improve their subjective sense of purpose and objective measures of productivity. 

It enables workers to make fewer decision-making errors, reduces group conflict, and creates a better communication environment. 

What is problematic in the workforce, therefore, is that 70% of workers do not feel that they can ask more questions at work, mainly because companies seek efficiency at the expense of genuine exploration – even though the latter often yields the former, executives are often blind to this fact.  

Authenticity  

Authenticity is what makes you a trustworthy and respected coworker when you tell the truth that is useful to everyone in the work environment – including when you make a mistake, because hiding mistakes makes them harder to fix. 

In other words, being authentic is being the person at work that people can rely on if they need help with something. In addition, it makes workers feel safe and comfortable showing up to work as themselves.  

Research shows that an environment conducive to authenticity in the workplace is also conducive to greater productivity, a sense of belonging, and a decrease in stress amongst workers. It also cuts turnover rates in half and improves team innovation by 90%.   

Being authentic here does not mean being transparent about yourself. Instead, it means showing up to do your job in a way that is efficient, trustworthy, and deserving of respect; it means encouraging an environment where facades are not necessary.  

Sharing too much can be a bad thing in some cases. Authenticity requires a degree of self-knowledge combined with a strong social awareness of etiquette, including basic compassionate respect for others.  

Facilitating this environment will require risk-taking that will undoubtedly lead to some failures. Work has traditionally been where curiosity and authenticity are shunned, and workers are somewhat conditioned to expect that from work.  

Hence, testing out an environment of curiosity and authenticity might be jarring for some. It may cause some workers to quit or even be fired for taking the message too literally by being more transparent than is appropriate.  

The benefits of facilitating such an environment, however, are clear enough. First, it is better to have bottom-up and top-down constructive criticism occurring in ways taken seriously than the traditional top-down approach, in which criticism is never going both ways as it should.  

Not to mention we want workers to come to work feeling genuinely safe, encouraged to innovate, and like they can be themselves. That is good for both companies’ and workers’ productivity and well-being.