What Really Drives Motivation at Work?

What truly drives motivation at work? Scientists, business leaders, and workplace designers have sought answers to this question for decades.

Whether designing a small office or a large corporate fit out, creating environments that support employee wellbeing and productivity is key. We’ve examined research-backed workplace motivation strategies to understand how office design influences performance, engagement, and motivation at work.

Go Your Own Way

Self-Determination Theory recognises three basic psychological needs: the skill to complete a task, a person’s process of controlling what they do (autonomous motivation), and their connection to others. People’s actions are generally linked to aspects such as who they are as a person, their concern for the welfare of others and honesty, as well as their attitude to other factors, including financial wealth, fame, image, meaningful relationships and contribution to the community.

Coupling company policy with a physical environment can reap dividends in terms of having motivated, well-performing staff, a sense of belonging with both bosses and peers, and achieving a high level of motivation at work. For example, if employers want their staff to feel confident and competent, they could provide multiple meeting spaces for training and development. If they want to give their staff freedom to experiment and initiate their own behaviours, they could offer informal seating areas for interactions, whiteboard walls for ideas or phone booths for quiet work.

Back to Basics

Carol Dweck’s system of basic psychological needs has three fundamental parts. Firstly, there is the need for acceptance or positive social engagement. When Dweck talks about ‘optimal predictability’, she means knowing what’s likely to happen in your world: what follows what, what belongs with what, or what causes what. Knowing everything that’s going to happen isn’t ideal either, as the possibility of new or complex situations can also motivate people, which is likely why a desire for new challenges often crops up in appraisals or job interviews.

Then there are building skills, where additional requirements include the need for trust, control, status, and the need to feel rooted or together. The latter is crucial in an office move, of course: letting your staff know what’s going on and how they can get the most out of their new office interior is essential. There are some cultural differences with these needs, too: what might be considered overly controlling in one company might be the norm in another.

Driving Motivation

Harvard Business School professors Lawrence and Nohria developed four drivers of human motivation: the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn, and the drive to defend. They say these enable mankind to survive, and these complex motives and choices separate us from other species.

Drilling into some of the details, we can be self-motivated, and we need to show our status by thinking of the executive corner office with the best views that were commonplace in the past. But we also need our long-term relationships and mutual commitment, so maybe that’s why we’ve seen a trend for prime positions after an office move to be given over to shared staff areas, as a sign the senior leadership team cares.

The defence driver to protect individuals and organisations can be considered in the context of workplace wellbeing: making sure there’s space to move around or ample acoustic protection from noise. Interestingly, meeting all of these drivers at the same time is no easy feat, both in the office and beyond. 

If Need Be

The pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will be familiar to business students, workplace designers and psychologists alike. At the bottom, it shows things such as air, water, and clothing, which are our most basic needs. Above that is safety, which takes in employment, health and property, followed by love and belonging and, above that, esteem. The top tier is self-actualisation, the desire to become the most that one can be: Maslow’s 1940s academic version of ‘be your best self’, one could argue.

Whether a small office design or a larger company, that could mean the right balance of meeting rooms and workstations to get the job done, space to be physically fitter so cycle storage and showers or providing places for mental wellbeing like yoga rooms or meditative spaces. A 2006 study took Maslow’s self-actualisation and looked at it as ‘self-transcendence’: getting satisfaction from doing things for others.

You could pinpoint the rise in companies offering staff allocated paid leave to work on charity or community projects and other corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives as examples of this ‘self-transcendence’. Maybe even space planning elements like transforming reception or rooftop areas into more public-facing spaces are ways the workplace can function to satisfy these fundamental human drivers.

Whether it’s Maslow, Dweck, or Harvard’s four drivers, one thing is clear: motivation at work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s shaped by how people feel, how much control they have, and how clearly they understand their purpose. The physical environment can reinforce or undermine those things. From breakout spaces and meeting rooms to policy decisions and team culture, motivation at work is built through the details, every single one of them sends a signal.

This article is based on a research piece, ‘The scientific systems behind the art of motivation,’ authored by Sally Augustin, a practicing environmental design psychologist based in Chicago, for WORKTECH Academy. Workplace Futures Group is a Corporate Member of the Academy, a global online platform and membership organisation for the future of work and workplace.