American View: Why Are Motivational Techniques No Longer Influencing Young Workers?

There aren’t any “fast paths” to professional success anymore for the non-privileged. In my parents’ day, a guy with a high school education could get a factory job right out of school, join a union, and reach the middle class by retirement on just one income. When I graduated high school, those factory jobs (and unions) were long gone, but it was still possible live on your own as a young adult (but you needed a working partner to afford a family). Now? It’s not in the cards.

That said, I think my boys have risen to the challenge (although I’m biased). They’ve silently endured all manner of abuse from incompetent bosses, learned how to “game” their office cultures, and put in the overtime needed to stay employed and move incrementally up the career ladder. They don’t have much hope of being able to break into the middle class (defined by the Pew Research Center as making at least $51,000 a year here in the DFW Metroplex) for years to come – if at all. They have zero hope of scoring a pension for retirement and will never be able to “retire,” but they can still – if they’re lucky – start a family someday.

That’s not their goal, though; not yet anyway. Right now, they want more than anything to be able to live on their own. Something that their parents took for granted back in the day yet has largely slipped out of reach for Gen Z Americans. They know this … and they’re depressed as hell about the lack of opportunities that previous generations took for granted. They have every reason to be ticked off.

Meanwhile, they’re being shovelled the same Dilbertean motivational tripe: lofty corporate values, mission statements, trust exercises, “career paths” and endless little perquisites that bosses have used for a century to “motivate” their minions to “give it their all.” This, while denying those same workers any semblance of job security, a retirement, affordable healthcare, or human dignity. It isn’t working.

You can’t convince a galley slave to “love his work” because the fat guy with the whip is “gifting him an excellent upper body workout!”

I say all this to set the context for how I think my youngest finally reached a threshold where he figured he could move out (assuming he can get a roommate to split the cost). One of the most common stories I hear about my youngest’s workplace is that everyone there is demoralized and unmotivated.

New workers burn out quickly. Very few of the senior workers are emotionally engaged with their work. Morale is fragile and turnover is extreme. No one gives a tinker’s damn about the company’s stock price or “increasing shareholder value.” Why should they? What are the shareholders doing for them?

My youngest assessed the environment and gambled that he could make a name for himself by feigning high motivation. It worked. He stands out to his bosses by coming to work cheerful and friendly. He accumulates goodwill by volunteering for extra work and taking on additional duties like Occupational Safety and Process Improvement. His rare steak of positivity stands out like a torch in a dark basement … and it’s given him a shot at a functional lead position that might earn him with the pay rise he needs to get fro under his parents’ roof.

I can hear the MBAs melting down from that last paragraph. Sure, bud: that’s how workers are supposed to act according to all the academic models.

Workers should be deeply grateful for having been given an opportunity work. They’ll throw themselves with cultist-like zeal into every task, all while joyously chanting slogans ripped straight from cheesy motivational posters. That’s the fantastic world that out-of-touch privileged folks have been taught about how to understand “the poors” below them.

Reality, however, puts paid to that lie. Desperate, demoralized, and near-destitute workers do not rejoice for their “opportunity” to grind away their lives as wage-slaves. That’s an attitude that only manifests in case studies and hallucinations. Real people despise the dependent position they’ve been forced into and resent the people profiting off of their misery.

That’s why my kid is savvily acting motivated. He isn’t motivated in the least; he doesn’t care if the company goes under. He pragmatically has zero interest in anything at work other than his own survival and the work environment he shares with his pals. My youngest understands that his job isn’t a career. He has no illusions about how his higher ups “value his contributions.” He knows he’s a disposable, fungible, meat robot who will be discarded and forgotten on a whim.

He’s worked out that his best path forward is to secure a reputation as the best worker on his shift so his bosses will appreciate him and, sometime in the future, take him along when they move on to their next McJob. He’s acting; playing the role of a good employee because that’s what stands out (in a good way).

So far, his gambit working. The moment it stops working, he’ll jump to a new gig and figure out what works there.

What he won’t do is buy into any of the empty rhetoric. He can’t be motivated by company branded merch, tiny gift cards, the occasional cheap pizza in the breakroom, or a poster on the wall declaring “we are quality!” Neither can his peers.

Playing the old tried-and-true motivation games with them wastes everyone’s time. You want to spark his interest? Pay him enough that he can live on his own and still get a decent night’s sleep.