The cost of losing curiosity in the workplace (and what you can do about it)

Most of us like to think of ourselves as curious. We ask questions, explore new ideas and want to understand why things happen the way they do.

In fact, the latest State of Curiosity report from SurveyMonkey found that 95% of workers considered themselves at least somewhat curious, while 60% described themselves as very curious.

But there’s a problem: just 30% said their workplace strongly rewards curiosity and, for employers, that’s a serious issue.

When people stop being curious at work – when they no longer ask questions, challenge assumptions or explore different ways of doing things – organisations become less innovative and less efficient. They also make poorer decisions and spend more time correcting problems they could have easily avoided.

So why is curiosity vital in the workplace? What’s getting in the way of curiosity in many organisations? And, most importantly, what can you do as an employer to create a workplace where people feel able to be curious?

Why curiosity matters in the workplace

Curiosity can sometimes look inefficient. Rather than simply getting on with things, a curious employee will often ask why they’re doing things a certain way in the first place. They’ll challenge assumptions – sometimes foundational ones – that everyone else just accepts. And they’ll spend time exploring an idea that doesn’t seem to produce any measurable result.

But that apparent inefficiency can have real value. In an HBR piece written in 2018, behavioural scientist Francesca Gino argued that curiosity can help organisations respond more effectively to uncertainty, generate more creative solutions and encourage people to think more deeply about the decisions they make. In doing so, they can also help organisations prevent costly mistakes.

These findings were supported by SurveyMonkey’s more recent study. It found that half of the employees it surveyed had been forced to redo work because the right questions weren’t asked at the beginning. Meanwhile, 46% of surveyed employees had seen time or money wasted because assumptions went unchallenged.

In other words, curiosity can operate as a kind of workplace quality-control mechanism.

Questions such as “Why are we doing it this way?”, “What are we assuming?”, “What might we have missed?” or even “Is there a better way?” can uncover issues that otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

What’s killing workplace curiosity in 2026?

If curiosity is so valuable, why do most employees say their workplaces don’t encourage it? 

SurveyMonkey’s research identified three key forces that can discourage people from asking questions or exploring ideas, even when they’re naturally curious.

1. The pressure to be efficient

As we noted at the beginning of this article, one of the biggest problems with curiosity is that it takes time.

If employees are under constant pressure to move quickly, meet deadlines and demonstrate productivity, asking extra questions can begin to feel like an expensive indulgence.

When that happens, meetings tend to become focused on updates and decisions rather than on exploration and questioning. Employees feel as though they should execute rather than investigate. And managers can send the message (even if it’s unintentional) that the fastest answer is the best one.

SurveyMonkey found that only 38% of employees said most meetings involved genuine open discussion or exploring ideas. 

It concluded that a relentless focus on efficiency could ultimately create inefficiency. If people didn’t have time to question assumptions at the beginning, organisations tended to spend significantly more time fixing problems down the track.

2. Fear of appearing uninformed

By its very nature, curiosity requires a degree of vulnerability. To ask a question, you first have to admit that you don’t know the answer. 

That can be difficult in workplaces where employees feel they’re expected to already understand everything. That’s especially true for people new to a role or early in their careers.

SurveyMonkey found that 44% of workers worried that asking too many questions would make them look incompetent rather than curious.

This encouraged employees to stay silent and pretend they understood. It also meant they usually followed an existing process rather than risk exposing a gap in their knowledge.

Over time, that tended to weaken both organisational learning and decision-making.

3. AI can become the middleman

SurveyMonkey found that Generative AI introduced another potential barrier to workplace curiosity.

Instead of asking a colleague, employees in 2026 often asked ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot for an explanation of workplace issues and received an answer in seconds.

While this could be useful in helping expand understanding quickly, it also led to the risk that AI would become a substitute for the conversations through which junior team members learned how more experienced colleagues thought.

But perhaps even more alarming is that SurveyMonkey found that it was actually business leaders who were more likely to turn to the “AI middleman” for answers. And the more often someone leaned on AI, the more often something went wrong. 

In fact, it concluded that when AI replaced colleagues for understanding, problems became the rule and not the exception.

A key reason for this was that a third of workers who used AI accepted its output either as-is or after only a quick check. This often meant the first answer became the final answer, with AI’s pattern recognition accepted at face value rather than challenged and refined. 

Those employees who tended to use AI more effectively had already partially solved the problem, so they’d done some of the thinking, had an understanding of the issues and could review AI’s output more critically. 

What does losing curiosity cost your organisation?

The consequences of declining curiosity go beyond missed ideas.

When employees stop asking questions, assumptions become embedded – even when they’re not true. Problems remain hidden for longer because no one scratched the surface. Junior employees learn less from experienced colleagues. And teams become more likely to repeat processes simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”, rather than looking for the best way.

That can have a direct commercial cost. 

As we’ve already noted, SurveyMonkey’s research showed that half of workers had been forced to redo work because the right questions weren’t asked at the outset, while 46% had seen time or money wasted because assumptions went unchallenged.

But there can also be a longer-term cost to organisational capability. Curiosity is one of the ways knowledge moves through a business. It’s how less experienced employees learn judgement, how teams uncover better ways of working and how organisations adapt when circumstances change.

If employees stop asking questions – or increasingly direct those questions only to AI – some of the informal learning that’s so important to both successful organisations and individual career development can simply disappear.

How to encourage more curiosity in your workplace

The good news is that most employees haven’t lost their curiosity. 

SurveyMonkey’s research suggests the bigger issue is that workplaces don’t always give them enough opportunity – or enough psychological safety – to express it.

When employees were asked what would help them be more curious at work, 77% nominated more opportunities for brainstorming, while 70% wanted greater psychological safety to ask questions. 

Employees also ranked stronger cross-team connections, reduced workloads and more unstructured time as solutions for helping foster more curiosity.

So what does this mean for your workplace?

Make it safe to say “I don’t know”

If employees believe asking questions will make them look incompetent, they’re much more likely to stay quiet.

That means leaders need to model curiosity themselves. Ask questions. Admit when you don’t know something. Invite people to challenge assumptions. And make it clear that thoughtful questioning is a strength rather than a weakness.

Psychological safety doesn’t mean every idea has to be accepted. But it does mean people should feel comfortable to raise a concern, ask for clarification when they don’t understand something or suggest a different approach when they think of one – all without worrying that doing so will count against them.

Create space for exploration

Curiosity needs room to breathe. If every meeting is focused purely on status updates, deadlines and decisions, there’s little opportunity for people to explore ideas or ask whether there might be a better way.

Of course, we’re not suggesting you make every catch-up an open-ended brainstorming session. But it could mean that you deliberately set time aside within most meetings for questions, discussion and reflection before moving straight to next steps. 

Encourage people to learn from each other

AI can provide fast answers, but it shouldn’t replace every conversation.

Encouraging employees to ask colleagues how they approached a problem, why they made a particular decision or what they’ve learned from experience can help preserve the informal transfer of knowledge that happens inside good teams.

This is particularly important for junior employees, who often learn judgement from watching and questioning more experienced colleagues.

Reward better questions, not just faster answers

Workplaces tend to reward visible output like decisions made, tasks completed and deadlines met. 

But if employers measure productivity only by speed, employees quickly learn that questioning and exploration are secondary to their job.

Managers can counter this by recognising those team members who uncover risks, challenge assumptions constructively or ask questions that lead to better outcomes.

After all, sometimes the most valuable contribution an employee can make isn’t having the answer but asking the question nobody else thought to ask.

Curiosity as a workplace capability 

Your organisation probably doesn’t have a shortage of curious people, but it may have employees who – consciously or unconsciously – have learned their curiosity isn’t always rewarded.

The challenge for employers, however, is that curiosity can look like the opposite of productivity. It involves stopping, questioning, exploring and occasionally going somewhere that leads nowhere. But that doesn’t make it wasted time.

In many cases, giving employees permission to slow down long enough to ask better questions may actually be what prevents wasted time in the first place, while also minimising poor decisions and unnecessary rework, and generating better business outcomes.

So, if you want a more curious workplace, the starting point should be to make sure your people know that getting things done matters.  

However, understanding why they’re doing them matters just as much.

Want more?

Need help building the practices and frameworks that help generate curiosity in your workplace? Get in touch.