If you’re looking for some strategies on how to motivate staff to improve performance, then you’ll love this article.
You’ve tried the pep talk. You’ve tried pizza Fridays. Maybe you even tried the bonus that everyone liked for about a week. And still, the work feels flat. People do what’s asked, log off on time and save their real energy for something else.
You’re not imagining it, and you’re far from alone. Motivation at work is in a slump almost everywhere right now, and the usual quick fixes rarely touch the cause.
The good news is that a lot of what actually moves performance is within your reach as a manager. Much of it costs nothing. Some of it means doing less, not more. Below are 19 ways to get there, each one backed by research or hard data, with something concrete you can do this week.
1. Look after your own engagement first
It sounds backwards. You came here to motivate other people, so why start with yourself?
Because the numbers say managers are where the slide begins. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, published in April 2026 and based on more than 141,000 employed respondents surveyed through 2025, found that global employee engagement dropped to 20%, its lowest point since 2020. Most of that fall came from managers. Their engagement went from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with a five-point drop in the last year alone. Managers used to be noticeably more engaged than the people they led; that cushion has nearly gone. Leaders also reported more stress, anger and loneliness than individual contributors.
The same report offers some hope. In what Gallup calls best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged, nearly four times the global average. So the decline isn’t fate.
A tired, cynical manager leaks that mood into every meeting. If you want a refresher on the basics of leading well, this guide on how to be a good boss is a useful companion.
Start small: block 30 minutes on Friday to list what drained you this week and one thing you can hand off, drop or ask for help with.
2. Make it safe to speak up
People who are afraid of looking stupid don’t flag problems early. They don’t suggest the odd idea. They wait, and performance quietly suffers.
Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has spent decades studying this. In an April 2024 interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business, she described psychological safety as believing you can say risky things like “I made a mistake” or “I disagree” without being punished. She also stressed that it gets misread as comfort or low standards, when it’s nothing of the sort. High standards and safety work together. A 2017 meta-analysis by Frazier and colleagues, pooling 136 samples, linked psychological safety with better learning, performance and engagement.
The part managers control most is the reaction. How you respond the first time someone admits an error teaches the whole team what’s allowed. It also helps to model being tolerant of people’s opinions when they clash with yours.
Next time someone brings you bad news, say “thanks for telling me early” before you say anything else.
3. Show them whose life their work touches
Most jobs help someone. The trouble is that the someone is usually invisible.
Adam Grant and colleagues tested this in a 2007 study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. University fundraising callers who met, briefly, a student whose scholarship their calls helped fund were tracked against two control groups. A month later, the group that met the student spent 142% more time on the phone and raised 171% more money. The controls didn’t change. It’s an older, small field experiment, but it’s the study that established the effect, and newer data points the same way: Gallup’s 2026 report found employees report stronger wellbeing and engagement when they feel their work improves other people’s lives.
You don’t need a dramatic reveal. A customer email read aloud in a team meeting works. So does inviting an internal “customer” from another department to explain what your team’s output lets them do.
Your move: find one real person your team helped this month and share their words, with permission, at your next team meeting.
4. Recognize specific work, and do it often
“Great job, everyone” is pleasant. It’s also forgettable.
Workhuman’s 2026 Humans at Work Barometer, a survey of 6,024 full-time employees in 10 countries carried out in February and March 2026, found that 41% of individual contributors believe their good work goes unseen, and one in three have no recognition program at all. Meanwhile, 80% said recognition makes valuable work visible across the organization. Note that Workhuman sells recognition software, so treat the framing with some caution. Still, the numbers line up with an earlier Workhuman and Gallup study, reported in September 2024, which followed more than 3,400 workers over two years and found that those who got high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to have left their job between 2022 and 2024. That’s a correlation, not proof that praise alone kept them, but it’s hard to ignore.
The useful kind of recognition is specific. Name the thing they did and why it mattered. “Your summary of the client call saved me an hour of prep” lands far better than a generic thumbs-up.
Give it a go: before Friday, send three people a two-line message naming one exact thing they did well.
5. Set goals that are clear and a bit of a stretch
Vague goals let everyone off the hook, including you. “Do your best” has no finish line.
Here’s the mechanism. A specific target tells people where to point their attention. A challenging one pushes them to put in more effort and keep going when it gets dull. And having a clear bar makes them look for better ways of working, because the old way won’t get them there. That chain is well supported. Kleingeld, van Mierlo and Arends pooled the research on group goals in a 2011 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Specific, difficult goals produced considerably higher group performance than vague ones, with a large effect size (d = 0.80).
There’s a catch worth knowing. In interdependent teams, individual goals aimed purely at personal results actually hurt group performance in the same analysis. Goals framed around each person’s contribution to the team helped. So design goals that make people pull together, not compete for credit.
If your team’s priorities feel scattered, getting more organized at work yourself makes this much easier to pull off.
Test it this week: rewrite one fuzzy team objective as a number with a date, and ask the team whether it feels hard but doable.
6. Hand over the “how”
Tell people what needs to happen and why. Then let them figure out how.
The strongest recent evidence here is a meta-analysis by Hagger and Starr, published in Stress and Health in February 2026. It pulled together 192 studies applying self-determination theory at work. Employees who felt their leaders supported their needs for autonomy, competence and connection reported those needs being met more often. That, in turn, linked to more self-driven motivation, and self-driven motivation linked to better outcomes like job satisfaction and engagement. Most of the underlying data is correlational, so read it as a strong pattern rather than a controlled test.
The flip side is micromanagement, which strips away exactly what this research says matters. If you suspect you’ve drifted that way, it’s worth reading what it feels like from the other side, in this piece on dealing with a micromanager.
Pick one task you normally specify step by step and, this time, agree the outcome and deadline only.
7. Have a short, real conversation every week
Annual reviews are too slow to change behavior. By the time feedback arrives, nobody remembers the project.
Gallup’s research on feedback, from surveys in 2022 that it updated in 2024, found that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week were fully engaged. The catch: in a Gallup study of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16% described their last conversation with their manager as extremely meaningful. These figures come from Gallup’s articles as summarized by secondary sources, so check the originals before quoting them in a board deck.
What made a conversation meaningful? Talking about recognition, goals, priorities and strengths. Dwelling on weaknesses ranked lowest. Fifteen to 30 minutes is plenty if it happens often.
It also helps to coach your team on how to ask you for input, the way this guide on how to ask for feedback from a manager explains.
Here’s a simple way in: book a recurring 20-minute slot with each direct report and open with “what’s going well, and what’s in your way?”
8. Ask before you decide
Think about the difference between staying in a hotel and living in a house you helped design. You treat the hotel room fine. You care for the house. People treat decisions the same way. The ones they had a hand in, they defend and fix. The ones handed down, they tolerate.
The analogy has limits. A house is yours to keep, and a work decision still belongs to the organization, so people won’t always feel ownership even when consulted. It also breaks down if you ask for input and then ignore all of it. That’s worse than not asking.
The idea itself has backing. Gallup’s Q12 engagement measure, the survey behind its 2026 global report, includes “At work, my opinions seem to count” as one of its twelve core elements, because Gallup’s research ties it to engagement and performance. And it fits the autonomy findings in item 6: having a say is one of the clearest ways people experience control over their work.
A quick experiment: before your next team-affecting decision, share two options and ask for a vote or objections within 48 hours.
9. Be careful with cash bonuses
Money matters. But it’s a weaker performance lever than most managers assume.
A 2026 meta-analysis in the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics by Petr Cala, Tomas Havranek and colleagues at Charles University pulled together 2,193 estimates from 88 economics experiments. After correcting for publication bias, they found that the effect of financial incentives on performance was close to zero in most field settings. Lab studies and loss-framed incentives showed modest gains. The picture isn’t one-sided, though. An earlier meta-analysis by Chen and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology (2023), covering 108 samples and over 71,000 people in real workplaces, did find pay for performance positively linked to job performance, with design and fairness making a big difference.
So the honest reading is: incentives can help when they’re well designed and seen as fair, but throwing more money at a motivation problem rarely fixes it on its own.
Before you approve your next bonus scheme, ask your team which matters more to them right now: a bit more cash, or fewer obstacles in their day. Their answer will tell you a lot.
10. Clear the calendar for deep work
Nobody does their best thinking in two-minute slices. Yet that’s the day many people now have.
Shopify tried something drastic in January 2023. The company deleted every recurring meeting with three or more people from employee calendars and added a two-week cooling-off period before any could come back. It also brought back meeting-free Wednesdays and squeezed meetings of 50-plus people into a six-hour window on Thursdays. According to the company, that cleared roughly 10,000 events and about 76,500 hours of meetings. It’s a single company, from nearly four years ago, and critics at the time pointed out that cutting meetings can create rework when teams lose alignment. But it showed how much time was there to reclaim.
The need hasn’t gone away. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index special report from June 2025, based on Microsoft 365 usage data, found that the average worker is interrupted every two minutes during core hours, about 275 times a day, and 48% of employees said their work felt chaotic and fragmented.
Protected time is what lets people reach a flow state at all.
Your move: pick one recurring meeting this week, cancel it for a fortnight and see if anyone misses it.
11. Let people shape their own role
Some of the best performance gains come from employees tweaking their own jobs: taking on tasks they’re good at, building better working relationships, seeing their work differently. Researchers call this job crafting.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Silapurem, Slemp and Jarden in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology looked only at longitudinal studies, 66 samples and over 27,000 people, which makes it more convincing than snapshot surveys. Job crafting was strongly linked to later work engagement and moderately linked to later job performance. One interesting exception: crafting that simply cut away demanding parts of the job showed little benefit, and sometimes travelled with burnout. Growth-oriented crafting helped; retreating didn’t.
Its literature search ran up to April 2020, so newer studies aren’t in it. Even so, it’s the most careful synthesis on this question so far.
Next time, do this: ask each team member which 10% of their role they’d expand and which 10% they’d hand off, then act on at least one answer.
12. Build growth paths people can actually see
If people can’t picture a future at your company, they’ll picture one somewhere else.
LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report 2025, published in February 2025 and based on a global survey of learning and development professionals, found that only 36% of organizations qualified as “career development champions” with mature programs. Those champions were more confident about retention and more likely to lead on AI adoption. The report also flagged a manager problem: half of respondents said managers lack the support they need to drive career development. Keep in mind this is a survey of L&D professionals about their own organizations, not of employees.
Development doesn’t have to mean expensive courses. A stretch assignment, shadowing someone senior or co-leading a project all count. Some of your quietest people may simply need someone to tell them they’re ready, which ties neatly into helping people stop underestimating themselves.
Ask each person this month: “Where do you want to be in two years, and what’s one skill that would get you closer?”
13. Offer flexibility where the job allows
Flexibility is often treated as a perk that trades off against productivity. The best evidence says it doesn’t have to.
Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, with Ruobing Han and James Liang, ran a randomized controlled trial at the travel firm Trip.com and published it in Nature in June 2024. For six months, 1,612 graduate employees in engineering, marketing, accounting and finance were randomly split between five office days and a hybrid schedule with two days at home. The hybrid group quit at a rate about a third lower, and their performance reviews over the following two years showed no damage. Trip.com then rolled out hybrid work across the company. It’s one company in one country, but the design is about as strong as workplace research gets.
Not every role can be remote, of course. Flexibility can also mean shift-swapping, compressed hours or choosing start times.
A quick experiment: offer your team one new flexible option for a trial month, and agree up front how you’ll judge whether it worked.
14. Treat workload like a performance metric
Overloaded people don’t perform better. They get sloppy, then sick, then gone.
The World Health Organization’s Guidelines on mental health at work, published in September 2022 and still the current edition, name heavy workloads as a core risk to mental health. For the first time, the WHO recommended training managers to spot and prevent stressful conditions and respond to staff in distress. The UK’s CIPD Good Work Index 2025, published in June 2025 from a survey of about 5,000 workers, adds recent numbers: a quarter of UK workers said their job harms their mental health, and excessive workloads, stress, poor relationships and weak line management were the factors most strongly tied to unhealthy work.
Burnout often shows up first as small changes: someone who stops volunteering ideas, or answers emails at midnight. Learn the signs of quiet cracking so you catch it early. And if your own stress is spiking, a few quick ways to calm your nervous system can help you stay steady.
Test it this week: at your next one-to-one, ask “on a scale of 1 to 10, how sustainable is your workload right now?” and take anything under 6 seriously.
15. Back your team’s use of new tools
Give people a new tool and walk away, and most will try it twice and go back to the old way.
Gallup’s 2026 report, drawing on its first-quarter 2026 U.S. workforce survey, found that frequent use of AI was far higher when employees strongly agreed their manager actively supports their team’s use of it: 79% versus 46%. Those employees were also 8.7 times as likely to say AI had transformed how work gets done. Yet fewer than a third of U.S. employees in organizations rolling out AI strongly agreed their manager supported them. These are survey associations, but the gap is big.
What helps is time to experiment, permission to get it wrong and clarity about what’s allowed. Some of your team may also be worried about what these tools mean for their jobs, and it’s worth knowing how to deal with AI anxiety so you can talk about it openly.
Set aside one hour this month where the whole team tries a tool on a real task and shares what worked and what flopped.
16. Celebrate progress, not just finish lines
Big wins are rare. Progress happens almost every day, if anyone bothers to notice it.
Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Steven Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 employees across seven companies for their 2011 book The Progress Principle. Of everything that made for a good workday, making progress on meaningful work came out on top. Small wins mattered more than you’d expect: 28% of minor events had a major effect on how people felt about their day. Bonuses and salaries barely came up in the diaries. Setbacks hit harder than progress helped, which means removing obstacles is as important as cheering wins. The research is from 2011, but it remains the main large diary study of its kind.
Start small: end your Friday team check-in by asking everyone to name one thing that moved forward this week, however minor.
17. Test shorter hours, carefully
Cutting hours to improve performance sounds like a contradiction. The recent evidence suggests it isn’t, at least under the right conditions.
Wen Fan and Juliet Schor of Boston College, with Orla Kelly and Guolin Gu, published the largest study so far in Nature Human Behaviour in July 2025. Across 141 organizations in six countries, 2,896 employees moved to a four-day week with no pay cut after first reorganizing their work for efficiency. After six months, they reported less burnout, higher job satisfaction and better mental and physical health, a pattern not seen in 12 control companies. The biggest gains came for people whose hours fell by eight or more a week, and the improvements ran through better sleep, less fatigue and a stronger sense of being able to do the job. The firms volunteered, which may inflate the results.
The key lesson is that the trials worked because companies cut waste first, not just hours. Rest matters too; if your team is running on poor sleep, they may need ideas on how to get to sleep faster as much as any policy change.
One low-risk way in: you don’t need a four-day week to start. Try one “no internal meetings” afternoon a week for a month and track what gets done.
18. Pay fairly, and explain how pay works
This might seem to contradict item 9. It doesn’t. Bonuses are a weak lever for extra effort, but feeling underpaid is a strong lever for disengagement.
The CIPD Good Work Index 2025 found that employees satisfied with their pay reported better performance, better mental health and a lower likelihood of quitting. The share who could keep up with bills without difficulty rose to 54%, from 50% in 2024, but plenty still struggle. These are correlations from a UK survey, so they can’t say pay satisfaction causes better performance. But money worries at home rarely stay at home; they follow people to work, as this piece on reducing financial stress explains.
You may not set salaries. You can usually push for a review, explain how pay decisions are made and make sure nobody discovers an unfair gap by accident.
Give it a go: write down, in plain words, how pay rises are decided in your team, and check whether your people could explain it back to you.
19. Learn what each person actually wants
One person wants public credit. Another would rather die. One craves new challenges; another wants stability while they care for a parent.
Here’s why that matters. Self-determination theory, the framework tested in Hagger and Starr’s 2026 meta-analysis from item 6, says motivation becomes self-driven when work connects to what a person values and feels they’ve chosen. A goal that matters to them gets internalized. A goal that feels imposed stays external, so it needs constant pushing. When you tailor tasks and recognition to what someone cares about, you’re moving work from the second category to the first. The evidence for that chain is mostly correlational, so expect it to work better for some people than others.
Picture this: two engineers get the same thank-you email from the CEO. One frames it. The other is mildly embarrassed and would have preferred a quiet afternoon off. Same gesture, opposite effect.
You don’t need a personality test to find out. You need to ask, then listen properly, which is where a guide to showing empathy to someone comes in handy.
This week, ask each team member: “What’s made work feel worthwhile for you lately, and what’s made it feel pointless?”
What to do when you slip
You will. You’ll snap at someone in a busy week, cancel the one-to-ones for a month, or roll out a change without asking anyone. Every manager does.
What matters is the repair. Steven Grover and colleagues, in a 2019 study in the Journal of Business Ethics, looked at how followers respond when leaders break their trust. In both a critical-incident study and a lab study, a good-quality apology encouraged forgiveness, and forgiveness rebuilt trust, especially for moderate mistakes. For very minor slips, an apology helped trust directly. For severe, deliberate violations, words alone carried less weight.
So, in practice:
- Name what you did, without hedging or “if anyone was upset” phrasing.
- Say what effect it had on them, not just how bad you feel.
- Say what you’ll do differently, then actually do it within a week.
- Restart the habit that slipped, even in a smaller form. A 10-minute check-in beats none.
Expect it to take a few repeats before people believe the change. Working on your emotional intelligence makes these conversations far less awkward.
Conclusion
Across all this research, the same ordinary habits keep coming up: notice good work, explain why it matters, let people decide how to do it, protect their time and energy, and keep talking with them.
You don’t need all 19 at once. Pick two that fit your team right now, try them for a month and watch what changes. Then add another.
For more practical ideas on leading people and doing your best work, browse our Work section.
