What executives get wrong about worker motivation
Summary
Well-meaning executives often implicitly ask for overwork, without acknowledging that the upside for the hustle has disappeared for the average employee. To reenergise and motivate their workforces, executives must do more than just appeal to tradition. Employees must see a proportional upside.
We work in a capitalist construct. In that construct, businesses want to get the most out of their employees, without increasing their wage bill. On this website, I’ve been critical of the pointy-haired bosses, who want to suck the life out of their employees, to the point that they devote every waking hour to their jobs. But today’s post isn’t about them. It’s about well-meaning leaders.
Hustling with a socialist
Many years ago, when I joined Thoughtworks, our founder, Roy, would glorify the hustle by saying that a job at Thoughtworks meant billing 40 hours to our clients and then 20 more hours to grow the company. In his heyday, Roy was a labour organiser and a self-proclaimed socialist, but of course, even socialist founders love themselves a capitalist hustle when it comes to their company! Jokes aside, Roy was a well-meaning individual. I understand his perspective. He wanted his small firm to punch above its weight, and he wanted his employees to partake in that ambition. To tell you the truth, I believed in what Roy said. In my early years, I put in the hard yards to the point that on some days, I slept in the office. My personal life suffered. I was 30 kg overweight, and my friendships went untended, but at work, I was a superstar!
There was a proportional upside, though. I started my career in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and joined Thoughtworks in 2007, just before the subprime crisis. Despite those two recessions, tech was a sunshine sector. The more effort I put in, the higher my upside was. I’m probably the world’s worst salary negotiator, but even then, my salary grew each year at the rate of 20-30%. If I exceeded my employers’ expectations, they’d exceed my expectations too! The relationship was reciprocal.
Moreover, at Thoughtworks, I always had excellent colleagues and bosses. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were friends, but the camaraderie made work enjoyable. My employment was never precarious, so there was never a question of staying in my lane. It was always about doing the best I could to solve a problem, and if I was wrong, everyone acknowledged that mistakes were the cost of progress. Naive and cocky as it may sound, I could act like I owned the place.
Fast forward to the present day
In 2026, the world of tech employment has changed. The AI bubble has sucked almost all funding out of the market in the quest to build more data centres. The money’s out there, but for silicon, not people. There’s uncertainty due to geopolitical issues and executives’ changing perceptions of what AI can and cannot do. For the average tech worker, it means a few things:
Job security is increasingly scarce. You don’t know when the next round of layoffs is coming. So the default behaviour is to stay in one’s lane and just do the job. Acting like you own the place is hard when you feel so insecure.
Many teams became more distributed after the pandemic, due to remote work and geographic expansion. While these work patterns brought in many efficiencies, companies didn’t plough back some of those savings to help their employees build a sense of connection to their collective. Retreats, off-sites, team lunches and even periodic face-to-face interactions have become rare. And no, return-to-office mandates don’t help for a variety of reasons. (more here and here)
Most importantly, the financial upside has almost disappeared for the vast majority of tech workers. Across the industry, salaries are stagnant, even as inflation soars in some countries. You could routinely hit the ball out of the work park, but you may still not see the salary scoreboard tick over.
Employment is a contract. All contracts are about give and take. Some contracts are explicit, such as the pay and prestige your job affords you. Other agreements, such as job security and your relationships with your boss and coworkers, are implicit. Much like a corporation wants to get the most out of its employees, an employee, too, wants to get the most possible from their job. When they hit a capped upside, motivation suffers.
Walking a mile in the worker’s shoes
The capped upside dynamic is something all well-meaning executives must empathise with and walk a mile in their employees’ shoes. I admit it's not easy to make this mindshift. After all, most executives earn multiples of the average employee, and their equity grants give them an almost unlimited upside if their corporations are successful. And mind you, several executive employment agreements offer severance protection. So, executives also enjoy job security, unlike the average employee. No wonder many executives endorse the “love what you do, so you never have to work a day in your life” mindset!
“Work will always be work. Some people work doing what they love. Other people work so that they can do what they love when they’re not working. Neither is more noble.” - Anis Mojgani.
By the way, I have no quarrel with well-paid, well-protected executives, even if it feels like socialism for the rich and free-market capitalism for everyone else. It’s crucial, however, that leaders recognise the privilege they have, which others don’t.
Work may be the centrepiece of an executive’s identity and life’s purpose, but that may not be true for everyone else.
An executive may see their personal welfare in working as long and hard as possible, but their employees may not see the same return on investment.
Most executives were once workers. I do not doubt that they worked hard to get to where they are today. I doff my hat to that work ethos. As I say that, I also recognise that many executives at large corporations were workers in a different era from today, an era of different upsides. And so, while work was the end-all for many tech workers of the 20th and early 21st century, that dynamic is changing today. The sooner executives empathise with that reality, the less friction there’ll be between workers and executives.
At a meta level, I hope our industry can move away from performative measures of productivity, such as hours worked, or presence in the office or online forums. I recently heard a mantra that’s worth orienting around.
“People matter. Results count.”
Focusing on that quote could open up a world of possibilities about the future of work.
Instead of hours at work, how do we shift focus to the results those hours deliver?
How do we make work rewarding, by giving our colleagues autonomy, mastery and purpose?
Instead of using office presence as a proxy for connection, how do we treat people as adults and give them the autonomy and time to connect on their own terms?
If corporations can’t give people meaningful pay hikes, how can they help them lower their expenses or improve their savings?
None of these is an easy question to answer, but leading a corporation was never meant to be easy. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, isn’t it?