Reduce your turnover with curiosity

RHéveil-matin is a daily column in which we provide managers and their employees with inspiring solutions to start their day right. While sipping your favorite beverage, discover new tips to make your 9@5 productive and motivated.

Waking up in the morning. It goes without saying that the curiosity of your employees is a quality that has great virtues for your organization. However, this goes beyond their simple interest in learning new things, believes author and consultant Scott Shigeoka: It’s also a powerful tool for making connections.

Managers who fail to see this difference, or who only enhance their team members’ ability to delve deeper into different topics — which, by the way, makes the company more innovative — are missing a golden opportunity to increase their retention rate.

Using curiosity for this purpose, by focusing on exchanges that go “deeper than the surface,” can solidify working relationships, foster a better understanding of yourself as a leader, and help you manage conflict or anxiety in the office. In a Harvard Business Review paper.

And when he studied what he calls “deep curiosity” at the Center for Greater Good Science, a research institute at the University of California, Berkeley, he found that managers could apply it to their organizational culture by adopting four principles: accepting not to know everything, caring about teammates, and realizing that they are Multidimensional, and interested in what everyone has to say.

“Intellectual humility”

Speaking with Fortune 500 Companies, Scott Shigeoka noted, “Many leaders are afraid to say ‘I don’t know,’ afraid of losing credibility, or appearing ill-equipped to do their jobs.” On the contrary, he believes.

Not only do leaders who realize they don’t have perfect knowledge appear more competent in the eyes of their colleagues, according to American and German researchers, but they also rise in esteem. Your employees will feel that they can trust you and that you are open to other people’s ideas.

Having shown “intellectual humility,” the manager should follow up with his or her interlocutor, trying to learn more in order to encourage “participation, collaboration, and problem solving,” advises the author of “Investigate: How Curiosity Can Change Your Life” to Change the World.

Understanding extended columns

Scott Shigeoka also recommends implementing a work habit that works small miracles in a relationship: grabbing the poles set by your partner, or in this case, your employee.

So, when an employee says that what he or she is learning in a particular subject fascinates him, or that his work schedule is busy, the manager should ask him to tell him more. Otherwise, these are missed opportunities to strengthen the relationship or bond of trust, and this can harm the organization, warns the expert.

“It can reduce employee burnout and stress, and […] “Enhancing creativity and innovation,” he writes.

More than one factor

Showing curiosity also allows you to recognize when an employee’s workload is affecting their personal life. Such “conflicts” affect the performance and productivity of your employees, reduce the feeling of psychological safety and ultimately lead to increased employee turnover.

Hence the importance of realizing that what happens outside the scope of 9@5 will inevitably have repercussions in professional life.

Open your blinders

“Not only is the modern workplace more interested in answers than questions, but it also has preconceived ideas about who has those said answers,” denounces Scott Shigeoka.

As with Pixar, the American animation studio to which we owe much of the technological progress in cinema, companies should willingly ask themselves who within the organization might have a point of view, or a different reading of the situation, which might lead to further reflection. .

By adopting these four principles themselves, managers will demonstrate the benefits of “deep curiosity” and inspire their team members to do the same. “And that’s how you build culture,” Scott Shigeoka recalls.

To work remotely or not to work remotely, this is the question that is causing turmoil in many companies with the beginning of the 2023 academic year.

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