---
title: "Motivation is an institutional problem"
description: "It's not that no one wants to work anymore.  People do want to work.  They want to be inspired to work hard.  However, the institutions that employ them have broken the contract under which that was done.  No one is motivated to work _for them_."
pubDate: "Apr 07 2026"
---

This morning Anil Dash posted [Actually, people love to work hard](https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/06/people-love-to-work-hard/). He argues that most people are energized by the opportunity to work hard with other people, if conditions are right. The rise of "nobody wants to work anymore" is just a misunderstanding of motivation.

I've worked as a manager, team lead or staff-level engineer for about a decade and I have seen companies regularly sabotage their own employees by demotivating them. I was fortunate to work at Asana in the late 2010s which put a lot of emphasis on giving the employees an environment to thrive and do their best work. However, since the pandemic, it has become clear that most companies have an adversarial relationship with their employees and have taken many steps that demotivate and alienate their employees. Now we get to listen to business leaders complain about the lack of a motivated work force, showing just how little they deserve our time and energy.

I'm going to be talking mostly from the standpoint of people in the tech industry and heavily biased towards my personal experience.

## What motivates people

Dash lays out four factors that he sees as key for motivating groups of people:

> - A clearly understood goal
> - A common set of values in pursuit of that goal
> - Permission to follow their own ideas to achieve their goal
> - Trust and responsibility to be accountable to one another
>
> If people have these things, and believe in what they’re doing together, they will joyfully work their asses off.
>
> It is genuinely one of the best feelings in life to be completely exhausted while sitting next to someone who’s been right beside you, shoulder to shoulder, fighting to accomplish the same goal. I’ve known that to be true whether we were launching a new company into the world, campaigning to get a candidate we believed in elected, organizing to rally people around an issue, raising funds for an important cause, or even just trying to get people together for a big event or party.

These four roughly map to a few other frameworks that I've found helpful for exploring motivation, that I've used with my reports, teammates and in my own life.

The first work I read on understanding motivation was [Drive by Daniel H. Pink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us). It's in the vein of popular psychology books that uses research as anecdotes to make an argument. It's a relatively good book and likely worth a read despite being a little out of date since its publication in 2009.

He came up with three factors that motivate people.

- Autonomy: self-direction and clear impact from your work
- Mastery: self-improvement over time
- Purpose: connection to something meaningful or important

This was my baseline framework for about a year. They are very simple and easy to understand. However, I think they miss some additional nuances. For example, I noticed that I often found I lacked motivation when the goals or the steps to get there were unclear.

Later in my career, I had to endure some mandatory management training given by LifeLabs Learning. They had a larger set of five core psychological needs that people want met. This became my go-to framework for evaluating motivation and engagement.

They used the somewhat arbitrary acronym [CAMPS](https://www.lifelabslearning.com/blog/whats-your-camps-score), which is a shame when SCAMP is also a possibility.

- Certainty: having clear expectations and priorities
- Autonomy: Self-direction and ownership
- Meaning: A connection to larger goals and values
- Progress: A sense of progress
- Social Inclusion: A sense of connection and belonging

I can see a lot of similarities in these three frameworks. Each of them encourages autonomy. They all ask that measurable progress be made in some way. All require some sense of progress or improvement which implies some form of measurement.

There are a few differences around the edges. Humans are notoriously messy and hard to quantify. Each of these is trying to reduce that unquantifiable humanity down to a few elements. They each come from slightly different perspectives, but they seem to be describing the same underlying concept.

Some people may resonate more with one framework or another. Some people may find social inclusion to be critical while others may prefer a less social work place. Try them out, see if they resonate with you or your team.

## Why no one wants to work anymore

Anyone who actually empathizes with their workers can see why motivation might be declining these days. The last decade has seen a steady shift in power from workers to corporations. Corporations have gotten larger and more monopolistic. Platforms have been enshitifying everything they can get their hands on, including work. Worker wages have been stagnant while corporate profits, valuations and inflation have all increased.

A great example is return-to-work policies after the pandemic. Employees generally enjoyed remote work flexibility and [productivity generally increased in most industries](https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productivity.htm). Those employees didn't have any trouble being motivated to work! However, companies started to implement restrictive return-to-office policies that took away the autonomy that employees enjoyed. Many employees quit, many returned begrudgingly. The company damaged worker motivation.

Over the last few years I've personally struggled to be motivated to work for most companies. I see virtually every tech company out there trying to monopolize and extract as much value from customers as possible with very little regard for the long-term effects on our society. I've never wanted to work for Facebook because I could see the damage they were doing to information and privacy. I soured on Google after working there from 2012 through when they removed "Don't be evil" from the code of conduct in 2015.

I thought that start-ups would be a good alternative. I see now that they may state a noble mission but their ultimate mission is just to make their founders and investors rich. They exist to widen the wealth gap, not close it. Now every start-up seems to be obsessed with riding the AI hype wave and trying to find new ways to put people out of work. It's gotten so bad that tech workers are darkly joking about it creating a [perpetual underclass](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/will-ai-trap-you-in-the-permanent-underclass).

## There are alternatives

Neo-liberal capitalist simps will tell you, "there is no alternative"[^tina]

They are wrong. I believe that there are a few ways that we can get our motivation back and get back to work. And we can't just wait for companies to start caring about workers. Corporations are profit-maximizing AI. They don't actually care about anyone. They are strongly incentivized to do the minimum possible to maximize their profit. The incentives of the system are designed to move towards more profit and find ways to externalize their costs. More on that another time.

The first thing that needs to happen is a realignment of goals and values. This establishes the mission and meaning. We need companies that don't just feel like vehicles for the ultra-rich to extract money from the rest of us. Some people are motivated by making as much money as possible and screwing over everyone else, but I believe those people are in the minority and should really seek therapy.

This can start with something like employee unions, which are at their lowest levels in a century[^union-membership]. These give employees a way to have a stake in the company and make sure that they get a voice in decision making and a share of the profits.

We also need anti-trust and market regulation with some teeth. The smaller companies that are integrated with their communities are being bought up by private equity or displaced by corporate behemoths who care less about the well-being of you or your community.

I think that a real alternative is worker-owned co-ops. Why struggle through aligning workers and owners when we can have a single class of worker-owners? Co-ops have their own complications, such as how decisions are made, but it's near impossible to not feel involved. Many co-ops follow a variant of the [Rochdale Principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles) which codify all the motivating factors above.

This is the critical first step. We must align the values of a company with the values of the owners. All these other values and crises of motivation will be solvable if companies can be made to care.

## What can we do now?

You can start to think about your motivation right now. Values can vary widely between people and situations. Maybe you value establishing a career or supporting a family and that keeps you focused. Maybe you really care about justice and equity and find that any job without it burns you out.

The most important thing is to realize this before you burn out and need to take a year off to reorient your life. Otherwise you'll be bound for a mid-life crisis.

If you are a leader, think about what motivates your employees. Some of my best teams have come from focusing on making my team as great a place to be as possible. Investing in motivating your employees is the best way to get work done. Any of the frameworks above is a great place to start.

People want to work. I want to work. You probably do too if you made it this far. Humans generally enjoy accomplishing hard things together, from barn-raisings to IPOs. If you think people don't want to work, you probably aren't giving them any reason to work for you.

[^tina]: [TINA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative) is common enough to get its own Wikipedia page! If anyone is trying to tell you not to consider other options, they are probably scared of the other options.

[^union-membership]: [Historical Union membership](https://data.epi.org/unions/union_members_historical/line/year/national/percent_union_members_historical/overall?timeStart=1917-01-01&timeEnd=2024-01-01&dateString=2024-01-01&highlightedLines=overall)
