The Secret to Motivating Your Employees
I recently had a conversation with a group of executives who were frustrated by the performance of their teams—during a discovery session, they mentioned:
“People just aren’t motivated.”
“They don’t take enough ownership.”
“We need better people.”
“Everyone seems checked out.”
I validated their frustration, and also asked the leadership team a question that encouraged them to dig a step deeper—How is the organization making it difficult for good people to be motivated?
A Harvard Business Review article by Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg, and Linda-Eling Lee offers a useful way to think about this problem. The authors’ based their research on a 2002 book called “Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices”, which identified four fundamental human drives that influence workplace motivation—the drives to:
Acquire,
Bond,
Comprehend, and
Defend.
Organizations can influence those drives and affect employee motivation through:
Compensation, rewards, and recognition,
Culture,
Job design, and
Fair and transparent processes.
Nearly two decades after this study was published, its basic idea still feels remarkably relevant. Unfortunately, leaders cannot simply demand motivation from their employees—instead, they have to create the conditions for motivation.
The Drive to Acquire: Motivation Starts with a Paycheck
Let's start with the obvious one—people are driven by a desire to acquire scarce goods that improve their lives. Accordingly, employees need to be paid fairly to be motivated. At the end of the day, compensation, benefits, recognition, and opportunities for advancement matter.
Ask yourself:
Are high performers recognized?
Are compensation decisions reasonably consistent and understandable?
Can employees see how their work contributes to organizational success?
Are promotions based on meaningful performance and leadership—not just who has been around the longest or who puts in the most face time?
Are you unintentionally rewarding behaviors that hurt the organization?
That last question is particularly important—some organizations say they value collaboration while promoting the person who consistently grabs credit and throws colleagues under the bus. Others say they value innovation while rewarding people who never make mistakes. Still others allege to value leadership while promoting the employee who works the longest hours and creates the most chaos.
Your reward system tells employees what the organization actually values.
The Drive to Bond: Collaborative Culture Inspires Motivation
How does your organization design jobs?
For better or worse, compensation alone isn’t enough to keep people motivated. Some of the least motivated people I have worked with were at the company that provided the most generous compensation packages in my career.
In addition to fair pay, provide opportunities for people to create meaningful relationships with colleagues. Humans want to feel respected, included, and connected to something larger than themselves. Yes, we’re talking about “culture” here.
Culture is what happens when:
Someone makes a mistake.
A disagreement happens between departments.
A new employee joins the team.
A leader receives bad news.
Someone raises a concern.
Two people want the same promotion.
The organization is under pressure.
A healthy culture doesn't mean everyone gets along all the time, but it does mean people can disagree without destroying relationships, raise problems without being punished for bringing them up, ask for help without being viewed as incompetent, and trust that their colleagues and leaders have their backs.
If employees spend more energy navigating office politics than doing their jobs, you likely have a motivation problem—and probably an organizational design problem, too.
The Drive to Comprehend: People Want to Grow
We’ve all seen the headlines—younger employees want work life balance, and in some extreme cases, news outlets are even accusing Gen Z of not being ready for work. However, regardless birth year, people generally want to learn, solve problems, develop expertise, and understand how things work.
Imagine being a smart, capable, and creative person, and then being asked to spend eight hours a day following a checklist you don't understand. Or, imagine being promoted to being a manager but given no authority to manage or make decisions.
In many cases, employees only stop being motivated when their job fails to give them anything to care about.
Good job design creates opportunities for people to:
Solve problems,
Develop skills,
Exercise judgment, and
See the impact of their work.
People should understand why their work matters, and how they are getting better at doing it.
The Drive to Defend: A Call for Transparency
Employees want to know that:
The rules are fair,
Decisions are explainable,
Leadership isn't going to arbitrarily change the game.
When employees don’t trust the organizational process, they start protecting themselves, spend time documenting every conversation, and stop taking risks.
Importantly, they also don't tell leadership what is really happening—they keep information to themselves; I have seen companies where executives enjoy being in a positive and self-congratulatory echo chamber. However, that environment rarely leads to motivated employees or exceptional outcomes.
When people don't trust the system, they build systems of self-protection and spend time figuring out how to navigate the organization instead of figuring out how to improve it. Those systems create or increase bureacracy, politics, duplication, and disengagement.
Fairness and transparency do not mean that everyone is treated the same way—it means people understand how decisions are made and believe the process is reasonably consistent and trustworthy.
The Real Leadership Challenge: Solving All Four
The most interesting part of the HBR research isn't simply that employees have multiple needs—it is that fixing one piece isn't necessarily enough.
An organization can pay people well and still have a toxic culture.
It can have a wonderful culture and still have terrible management practices.
It can provide professional development while giving employees no meaningful authority.
It can have great people while operating through inconsistent and opaque decision-making.
What Leaders Can Actually Do
The good news is that improving motivation doesn't necessarily require a massive organizational transformation. Start with the basics:
Option 1: Make performance and rewards make sense.
Look at compensation, recognition, promotions, and incentives. Are they reinforcing the behaviors you actually want?
Option 2: Give people clarity.
People are far more likely to take ownership when they understand what they are responsible for, what success looks like, and what decisions they can make themselves.
Option 3: Fix unnecessary friction.
If employees constantly complain about cumbersome approvals, outdated technology, unclear processes, or redundant meetings, don't automatically label them as resistant—see if you have legitimate operational problems.
Option 4: Develop managers.
Your employees experience your organization primarily through their immediate managers. Give those managers the skills, expectations, tools, and authority they need to lead effectively.
Option 5: Create opportunities for meaningful work.
Look for ways to give people more ownership, problem-solving opportunities, and visibility into the impact of their work.
Option 6: Make decisions more transparent.
People don't have to agree with every decision, but they should understand why decisions are being made and how those decisions affect them.
Option 7: Pay attention to what your organization rewards.
Employees are constantly watching.
If you say you value collaboration but reward individual heroics, they'll notice.
If you say you value work-life balance but celebrate the person who responds to emails at midnight, they'll notice.
If you say you want people to speak up but punish the person who delivers bad news, they'll definitely notice.
Your employees learn what matters by watching what happens—not by reading what you wrote in the employee handbook or listening to what you say in an All Hands.
Motivation Is an Operations Issue
We often treat employee engagement as an HR problem, but many of the things that determine whether employees are engaged are actually operational problems.
Unclear roles?
Operations.
Bad communication?
Operations.
Broken decision-making?
Operations.
Constantly changing priorities?
Operations.
Inefficient processes?
Operations.
Managers who don't know who has authority to make decisions?
Operations.
Employees who are exhausted because the organization keeps reinventing the same process?
You guessed it: operations.
That is why improving employee motivation isn't simply about making employees happier—it is about building an organization where people can actually do good work.
Organizations that work require leadership, structure, accountability, communication, and systems that work.
