You Have Probably Tried All of This Already
The pizza Fridays. The employee of the month board. The engagement survey that took three weeks to build and six months to act on. The team-building afternoon that everyone smiled through and nobody mentioned again.
Maybe a wellness stipend. Maybe a new recognition platform where people can send each other digital badges. Maybe a quarterly town hall where leadership talks about vision and values while the room quietly checks their phones.
None of it is wrong, exactly. Some of it even helps. For a while.
But if you are reading an article called "how to motivate employees," chances are you have already tried the standard playbook. And something is still not landing. Often, what looks like low motivation is actually early-stage workplace disengagement
That is because most approaches to motivating employees treat the symptoms of disengagement without asking what caused it. They add things on top of a problem instead of looking underneath it.
The question worth sitting with is not "What incentive will make people work harder?" It is: "Why have people stopped wanting to?"
The Question Behind the Question
When a manager searches "how do you motivate team members," what they are really asking is: something has shifted, and I do not know how to fix it.
Maybe someone who used to be the most engaged person on the team has gone quiet. Maybe the energy in meetings has flattened. Maybe people are doing what is asked and nothing more. Present but absent.
The research consistently points to the same handful of drivers behind that kind of withdrawal. Feeling invisible. Doing work that feels pointless. Having no say in how the work gets done. Reporting to someone who does not listen. Being asked for input after a decision has already been made.
These are not motivation problems. They are connection problems. And they cannot be solved by adding a perk. They are connection problems rooted in how working relationships are built
Gallup's 2025 global data shows that only about 21% of employees worldwide feel engaged at work. That is not a failure of incentive design. It is a signal that something much more fundamental is missing for most people.
What Actually Motivates People at Work
Self-determination theory, one of the most rigorously tested frameworks in motivation research, identifies three basic psychological needs that drive human behaviour: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these needs are met at work, people are intrinsically motivated. When they are frustrated, people disengage. No amount of external incentive overrides that.
Let us translate those into plain language.
Autonomy: being trusted to do the work your way
People who have some genuine control over how they work, when they work, or how they approach a problem are consistently more engaged than those who do not. This is not about removing all structure. It is about respecting the fact that adults do their best work when they are trusted to make decisions.
The opposite of autonomy is micromanagement. And micromanagement does not just slow people down. It sends a message: we do not trust you. That message kills motivation faster than any perk can restore it.
Belonging: feeling genuinely connected to the people around you
The research on this is striking. Employees who feel a sense of relatedness at work, who feel connected to their team, supported by their manager, and part of something larger than their own role, are significantly more likely to be engaged, creative, and resilient.
Belonging is not about forced fun. It is about whether someone feels safe enough to be honest. Whether they believe their colleagues have their back. Whether they would describe their team as people who care about each other, not just people who sit near each other.
How to motivate employees is, at its core, a question about belonging. People who feel they belong do not need to be motivated. They already are.
Purpose: knowing why the work matters
This one gets misunderstood. Purpose at work does not mean every task has to feel like a calling. It means people understand how their work connects to something meaningful. It means someone has taken the time to explain why it matters, not just what needs to be done.
When people feel their work is meaningless, or when they cannot see how it contributes to anything beyond a spreadsheet, they stop caring. Not because they are lazy. Because meaning is a basic human need, and work that lacks it becomes something to endure.
What Motivating Employees Actually Looks Like Day to Day
If the three drivers are autonomy, belonging, and purpose, then the answer to how can you motivate people is less about programs and more about moments.
It looks like the manager who starts a one-on-one by asking, "What do you need from me this week?" and means it. Not as a script. As a genuine question.
It looks like a team that debriefs a failed project with honesty instead of blame. Where someone can say, "That did not work, and here is what I would do differently," and the room does not punish them for it.
It looks like a leader who shares credit publicly and takes responsibility privately. Who does not need to be the smartest person in the room. Who makes space for other people's ideas and then actually uses them.
It looks like someone is noticing when a team member has gone quiet and checking in. Not with a performance management hat on. With a human one. In more mature organisations, this is reinforced through mental health safety planning
It looks like explaining the why behind a decision, even when it would be faster not to. Because motivating workers is not about getting them to do more. It is about helping them understand why the work is worth doing.
None of these require a budget. All of them require attention.
The Things That Kill Motivation (That Nobody Puts on the Survey)
Engagement surveys measure what people are willing to say on record. The real motivation killers tend to live in the space between the questions.
Meetings that could have been emails. Feedback that only surfaces during annual reviews. Decisions presented as consultations when the outcome was already decided. Watching someone get promoted because they were visible, not because they were good.
Being asked to do more without anything being taken away. Being thanked in a town hall by a leader who does not know your name. Being told the company values its people while the headcount shrinks for the third quarter in a row.
These are not things people complain about formally. They are the things people talk about in the car on the way home. And over time, they erode something that is very hard to rebuild. If you want to understand how to motivate people, start by understanding what is quietly demotivating them.
You do not motivate employees by adding good things on top of bad conditions. You motivate them by removing the things that make caring feel pointless.
One Last Thing
The word "motivation" comes from the Latin movere. To move. And that is a useful way to think about it.
You cannot make people move. You cannot push, incentivise, or programme people into caring. But you can remove the things that keep them stuck. And you can create environments where people naturally want to move. Toward their work. Toward each other. Toward something that feels worth their time.
That is not a management technique. That is a culture. And cultures are built one honest conversation, one moment of trust, one act of genuine attention at a time.
KanYini Earth is an Australian not-for-profit organisation rooted in an ancient philosophy of connection, working across writing, storytelling, education, and public conversation. The work we do is grounded in a simple observation: when people feel seen, supported, and connected to the people around them, they do not need to be told to care. They just do.
The learning programs we are developing are designed around exactly that kind of everyday leadership. Recognising what someone needs before they ask for it. Creating the conditions where people feel safe enough to bring their full selves to work. Building teams where motivation is not a problem to solve but a natural consequence of how people treat each other.
References
Gallup. (2025). State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report. Gallup, Inc. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.
Harper, D. (n.d.). Motive. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/motive
