Employees are motivated by different things. Understanding what matters to each person helps you assign work, provide support, and recognize contributions in ways that encourage them to do their best work. Clear expectations, meaningful responsibilities, and fair treatment all contribute to an environment where people can succeed.
What Motivating Employees Actually Means
Motivation and engagement are easy to conflate, but they mean different things. Engagement describes how connected and committed someone feels to the organization over time, something I write about more fully in my guide to employee engagement strategies. Motivation is narrower and more immediate: the drive to put effort into the work in front of them today. A person can be loyal to the company and still coast on a particular project, or care a great deal about their work while feeling distant from the organization as a whole. Trust, belonging, clarity, and a sense of ownership can support both, so the same change often lifts engagement and motivation at once.
Why Manager Engagement Matters
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20 percent of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, the lowest level since 2020. The drop was steepest among managers, whose engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025, and Gallup describes managers as often the primary way employees experience their employer. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2025.
Managers don’t control everything that shapes how motivated a team is. Pay, workload, personal circumstances, and the wider organization all play a part. But a manager shapes much of the team’s day-to-day working conditions, and when a manager is stretched thin or unclear on their own priorities, it becomes harder to give a team the clarity, attention, and feedback that motivation depends on. If your team’s effort has slipped, it’s worth examining your own focus and capacity before you reach for a new incentive.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
Research on self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three basic psychological needs that support motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Intrinsic motivation means doing something because you find the activity itself interesting or enjoyable. Extrinsic motivation means doing something for a separate outcome, such as earning a bonus, gaining recognition, or advancing a goal you value. Both can support sustained effort, depending on the work and the reasons behind it.
Incentives can help, but their effect depends on how they’re designed. A bonus tied to a clear, fair target can focus attention and reward good work, while a reward that feels controlling or arbitrary can pull a person’s attention toward the payout and away from the work itself. Autonomy and goals a person finds personally meaningful matter across almost any kind of work, routine or creative, so they’re worth building in alongside a financial incentive rather than treating one as a substitute for the other. Before adding an incentive, it helps to understand what’s actually getting in the way, since the right fix depends on the cause.
| Dimension | Intrinsic motivation | Extrinsic motivation |
| What drives it | Interest in and enjoyment of the work itself. | Rewards, recognition, avoiding consequences, or pursuing a valued outcome. |
| How long it lasts | Can persist while the work remains interesting and enjoyable. | Varies depending on the incentive and how personally meaningful the outcome is. |
| How leaders can support it | Provide opportunities for interesting work, learning, and autonomy. | Offer fair incentives and explain how the work supports goals employees value. |
How to Motivate Employees: A Practical Framework
Here are five ways to support your team’s motivation.
1. Make the standard clear
Unclear expectations can leave employees working hard without producing the result you need. Tell them plainly what the outcome should be, when it’s due, and how you’ll judge whether it worked. Where you can, show an example of strong work so the target isn’t abstract. If someone’s output frustrates you, check first whether you ever defined what good would look like, because the gap is often there rather than in their effort. Clear standards also make it safer to hand over control later, since people know what they’re aiming for.
2. Explain why the work matters
When you hand someone a task, tell them why it matters: who depends on it, what it makes possible, or how it fits the larger goal. People sustain effort more easily when they understand the point of what they’re doing, and that context is easy to leave out when you’re moving fast. A small task doesn’t need to be inflated into a grand mission, but it does need a reason attached.
3. Learn what drives each person
Different people want different things from their work, so it’s worth figuring out what drives each individual rather than assuming. You can learn a lot by watching what someone volunteers for and what they avoid, and by asking directly what part of their job they’d want to do more of, what they enjoy most, and what wears them down. Joyce Mullen, the CEO of Insight, made this point when she joined me on Thirty Minute Mentors. Early in her career, she managed a team that ranged from people fresh out of high school to colleagues in their sixties, and what stayed with her was the need to understand what matters to each individual and line the work up with it, right down to, in her words, “what they love and what they don’t.” To act on that, pay attention to what each person is good at and drawn to, and shift more of that kind of work their way when you can. The tasks no one enjoys still have to get done, so share them fairly across the team instead of always assigning them to the same people.
4. Give people real ownership
Autonomy is one of the strongest sources of intrinsic motivation, and offering more of it usually costs nothing. Hand over the outcome and let the person decide how to get there, rather than assigning the task and keeping every decision for yourself. The hard part is holding back when they approach something differently than you would. If the result meets the standard you set, resist stepping in to make it match your own method. Taking the decision back teaches people that the ownership was never really theirs, and the effort that comes with it tends to fade.
5. Recognize work in a way that fits the person
Recognition works best when it’s specific and suited to the individual. Name the particular thing someone did and the difference it made, so they know what to repeat. Generic praise tells people little about what they did well. Match the form to the person as well, since some want public credit while others would rather hear it privately. If you’re not sure, ask how they prefer to be recognized. Credit that routinely goes to the wrong person does more damage than saying nothing at all.
Want to hear how accomplished leaders think about getting the best from their people? It’s a subject I come back to often on my podcast. Listen to Thirty Minute Mentors, where I talk with CEOs, founders, and other leaders about how they build and lead their teams.
What Demotivates Your Best People
It’s often faster to remove what drains motivation than to add new sources of it, and your most capable people tend to notice those problems first. I’ve written more about the management habits that erode trust and culture in my piece on leadership mistakes that hurt company culture, and several of them also weaken motivation. These are some of the most common and most overlooked:
- Inconsistent standards: When the rules seem to shift depending on who’s involved or what kind of mood you’re in, people stop believing effort will be judged fairly. Apply the same standard openly, and explain your reasoning when an exception is genuinely warranted.
- Micromanagement: Reclaiming decisions you delegated signals that you don’t actually trust the person. If you need to stay informed, agree on check-in points in advance instead of inserting yourself into every call.
- Unclear expectations: Few things drain a capable person faster than doing real work only to learn it was aimed at the wrong target. Confirm what success looks like before the work starts, not after.
- Misdirected credit: When recognition goes to the most visible person rather than the one who did the work, your strongest contributors learn that being seen matters more than delivering. Track who actually did what, and say so.
- Tolerating poor performance: High performers watch what you accept. When weak work carries no consequence, the people carrying the load conclude that their extra effort is optional. Address the problem directly rather than absorbing it yourself.
Each of these is worth checking before you assume a motivation problem lies with the person.
“Adam was inspiring, insightful, and entertaining. He weaves together knowledge drawn from his hundreds of interviews and distills this into action items anyone can absorb and use personally and professionally. Highly recommend!”
— Donna Braswell, Fiscal and Operations Manager, Wright State University
In my keynotes and workshops, I share lessons from my interviews with more than 500 of America’s top leaders to help leaders understand what motivates their employees and create an environment where they can do their best work. Learn more about bringing me in to speak at your event.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between motivation and engagement?
Engagement is how connected and committed an employee feels to the organization over time. Motivation is the more immediate drive to put effort into a specific task or goal. Someone can be engaged with the company but unmotivated on a given project, or motivated by work they enjoy while feeling disconnected from the organization. Trust, clear expectations, and meaningful work can support both engagement and motivation.
What motivates employees the most?
There’s no single answer that fits everyone, which is why standardized programs often fall short. Pay and benefits matter, and research on self-determination theory shows that autonomy, competence, and connection also play important roles in sustaining motivation.
Do bonuses and raises actually motivate employees?
Yes. Raises can recognize an employee’s contribution and address inadequate compensation, while bonuses can reward progress toward specific goals. Financial rewards alone don’t address every factor that sustains motivation, especially in complex or creative work. Relying only on them can also pull a person’s attention away from the work and toward the payout.
How do you motivate employees without money?
Many of the strongest motivators cost nothing. Clear expectations, real ownership over how the work is done, specific recognition, and a visible connection between the work and something that matters all support motivation without a budget line. These address needs that compensation alone can’t meet.
How do you motivate a disengaged employee?
Start by finding out what changed instead of assuming you already know. A once-strong performer who has pulled back is usually responding to something specific, such as a goal they’ve been unable to pursue, a loss of trust, unclear direction, or burnout. Ask directly, listen without rushing to fix it, and address the cause. Adding incentives before you understand what’s wrong rarely works and sometimes makes it worse.
How can managers stay motivated themselves?
It’s a real issue, since manager engagement has fallen faster than that of the people they lead. Managers protect their own drive by keeping time for the parts of the work they find meaningful, getting clarity and support from their own leaders, and resisting the urge to take on every problem personally. It matters for the whole team, because a depleted manager may find it harder to support and motivate others.
Putting This Into Practice
Ask each person on your team what helps them do their best work and what gets in the way. Use what you learn to clarify expectations, improve assignments, and provide support. Follow through on the changes you commit to, and explain constraints honestly. These efforts need to accompany fair pay, adequate resources, and reasonable workloads.
