Do you have a curious culture in your workplace? Do employees seek resources, answers and new ways to capture business?

A study conducted by professor of psychology and author Todd Kashdan concluded that companies say they value curiosity, but stifle it anyway. The survey of workers across 16 different industries found that 65 percent of workers say that curiosity is critical to discovering new ideas, but the same percentage said they also felt unable to ask questions on the job.

Yesterday, Promotional Consultant Today explored three tips on how to ensure you are hiring curious employees for your organization. In today’s final installment of our four-part curiosity series, we delve into how an organization can cultivate curiosity among employees and leaders.

In her article “Three Ways to Cultivate Curiosity in Your Workplace,” StongMind content strategist, Wendy Brooks, argues that curiosity is something that can be, and should be, developed and nurtured within an organization, using these three tips:

1. Encourage questions. Innovation stems from asking lots of questions. And not just safe questions, but the crazy questions about how things are and how they might be that could be threatening to many people who are comfortable with the status quo. Providing an environment that encourages barrages of questions while leaving egos at the door when asking and responding can free the company for breakthroughs. Encouraging questions encourages curiosity.

2. Embrace experimentation—and failure. Curiosity is satisfied not just by imagining, but also by experimenting. With the world, your business and your competitors moving so quickly today, gone is the luxury of waiting until a product or process is fully perfected to get it out there. Embracing experimentation through iterative or agile innovation can risk failures, but also can reward with fast learnings from those failures and ultimately more rapid successes.

3. Establish an environment conducive to learning. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by what we don’t know and have yet to learn about our business, products, customers and competitors. But to cultivate curiosity, questioning and experimenting need to be paired with continual learning. Brooks suggests giving teams and employees access to a learning resource with a depth and breadth of content and, also, to encourage discovery of learning resources on their own.

PCT returns to your inbox tomorrow with five ways to end your day on a positive note.

Source: Wendy Brooks is an author, content strategist and writer for Safari, a platform that helps employees learn the way they prefer-on-demand video, live online training, text or exclusive interactive formats like Oriole online tutorials-together with their team or independently.