One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their agenda, even though they know it’s false. There is an apparently infinite attention appetite for commentators who troll for attention by saying how “kids these days” don’t want to work hard.

As has often been documented, the hoary chestnut of saying “nobody wants to work anymore” dates back decades, if not centuries, and it’s never been true in all those years of deletion. It is, firstly, a tactic that bosses use for negging workers in a vain attempt to try to drive down wages (and to successfully get media to blame people for their own underemployment), but it also serves as an effective demonstration of just how little society understand about what actually motivates people.

I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard. The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:

• 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.

Every time, the feeling of being soul-tired next to folks who you know you can trust because they showed up and worked their asses off just like you did, is among the most motivating and inspiring things you can experience. Nobody who’s ever been lucky enough to have had a moment like that could ever think that people “don’t want to work”.

When work doesn’t work

What people face too often is being ground down by systems, institutions, and unjust leaders who insist on creating roles where people are forced to do dehumanizing, isolated, meaningless work, while not being given the agency to make smart and empowered decisions about how the work gets done. Or worse, they’re forced to do work in service of goals that are actively harmful and destructive, and contrary to their own values, or just contrary to basic human decency. It’s not that people are unwilling to work, it is that they are working — to balance their own humanity with the crushing burdens of having to provide for themselves and their families. It is exhausting for a good person to have to do bad work or harmful work or pointless work, just to pay the bills. Being less “productive” in those situations isn’t a shortcoming, it’s a measure of still having an immune system that’s resistant to these moral injuries.

Preserving your soul and sanity in an organization with no morals is very hard work. If you think your workers aren’t working hard, maybe you’re ignoring the toughest part of their job.

And even in more moderate organizations, where things aren’t overtly evil so much as frequently frustrating and burdensome and stressful, there are still plenty of reasons that people aren’t as “productive” (as defined by bosses). Many of these reasons could be addressed by leadership taking accountability for the context and communication provided to workers for their responsibilities. Empowered workers who are given high levels of trust and autonomy tend to be extremely productive, and don’t need babysitting from management. If you treat adults like idiots, they will respond in kind.

There’s also the issue of what people are provided beyond their paychecks. Ideally, everyone on a team will have enough resources to do the job properly, but in a mission-aligned organization even that can be optional at first, because scrappy teams are pretty adept at making something out of nothing if they really have to. There just needs to be a point where they’re not starved of appropriate resources anymore, and it’s a leader’s ethical responsibility to provide everything people need to thrive and be healthy and happy in the long term. The key point here is that people are not driven by greedy, selfish motivations in organizations that accomplish meaningful things; if there’s trust that they’ll be taken care of, and that leaders are worthy of that trust, people will over-deliver in service of the common goal.

But in many organizations, people are given crappy tools, miserable working environments, overbearing surveillance of their workplaces and digital workspaces, meaningless and abstract metrics to achieve, and all of these are delivered with corporate communications that don’t sound like any human being ever. The executives who inflict all of this on the workers hope that they don’t notice that none of the execs are expected to endure any of this.

Finally, fundamentally, there is pay. Compensation and real-world wages have been plummeting for decades; the growing chasm of wealth inequality has been well-documented for many years. But the quiet indignities around that degradation in standard of living have increased, as well, with the chipping away at leisure time through always-accessible digital tools making people have to be on call for their jobs during every waking hour.

The erosion of social norms around employment has been so complete over the last few decades that people born in this century don’t even believe that there was a time when it was not only routine for Americans to be union members, but for private sector companies to provide, and honor, pensions for their employees to benefit from in retirement. The mere suggestion of the idea would get a public company CEO fired in the current era.

Who do we work for?

Why would someone work for an institution that is actively working to undermine their well-being? Most large companies are spending more time strategizing against their employees than against their competitors. Too many nonprofits and other ostensibly non-corporate institutions have gotten the same idea. But it is management that does not want those workers to work — or they would act like it. If your workers aren’t massively motivated to do great work, it’s your fault. Because all you have to do is provide a worthy mission and get the fuck out of the way.

How do I know? Because I’ve gotten it right, and I’ve gotten it wrong. When I’ve taken my eye off the ball, either for unavoidable business reasons, or because I made mistakes due to inexperience or ego or distraction or competition or bad luck or whatever else, the people on my team showed it. Work stopped, quality dropped, frustration and tension increased, and all of a sudden my managers were telling me that “these folks don’t want to work”. Eventually I learned: the right thing to do is to tell those managers that we should be asking, “How are we failing?” Because, short of personal emergencies or life situations that keep them from being able to do their best work, people want to feel proud about the work they’re doing, and to feel like they’re not wasting their time every day when they go into the office. They don’t want to resent their bosses or be annoyed at their coworkers.

The few times I’ve been lucky enough to get it right have been the most satisfying times in my career. Once or twice, I’ve gotten to work for great bosses. They really inspired me to do great work, and taught me a lot that I didn’t know how to do before, or motivated me to want to learn on my own. But more importantly, they made an environment where I could collaborate with my coworkers to do more than I thought was possible, both by myself and especially together with others. I hope that at my best, the teams I’ve led have had a bit of that same feeling; I know I’ve been so proud of what I’ve seen them create and accomplish that they certainly have inspired me over the years.

But perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from watching great teams work is that the cynical, toxic view of people’s intrinsic motivations and work ethic that we hear so often is a damnable lie. Most people are tireless and brave and brilliant in the work they do, when it’s work that has purpose and passion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is telling on themselves, and revealing their own lack of imagination and vision about what it’s possible for people to create together.