In short
- When we want to lift motivation, we usually reach for more reward or less effort. There's a third option, and the research puts it above both. Can people see they're getting somewhere?
- Effort isn't only a cost. The same result feels more valuable when we had to work for it. That breaks down when effort consistently goes nowhere.
- In a survey of 151,000 people (APS Census, 2025), when an employee's workload is above capacity and their job doesn't use their skills, they're 2.5 times more likely to report burnout. The bigger the organisation, the harder progress is to see.
- You can't guarantee outcomes. But you can recognise effort and progress.
Researchers (Amabile and Kramer) asked 669 managers to rank the things that affect how motivated people are at work. Only around 5% put progress first, and on average, they ranked it last.
What did they rank first? Recognition for good work. Which makes sense. When we want to lift motivation, we reach for one of two things: increase the reward, or reduce the effort. Recognition is the fastest version of the first, and it can work, if done well (there are a lot of ways to do it poorly).
But Amabile and Kramer's data points to a third, more powerful option: seeing progress in the work. It's the one we reach for least, and it's often the hardest to build. You can thank someone in ten seconds. Making progress visible sometimes means changing how the work is designed or delivered.
The effort paradox: effort does two things at once
We talk about effort as though it were purely a cost. Something to minimise, protect people from, engineer out where we can.
But think about the piece of work you're proudest of. It was probably one of the hardest things you've done. There's a name for this in the research (Inzlicht, Shenhav and Olivola): the effort paradox.
- Effort is genuinely costly, and we're built to avoid it.
- Yet the same result feels more valuable when we have to work hard for it.
This is part of the reason why things like fitness competitions and weightlifting can be so satisfying: you can see consistent progress when you put in consistent effort. I pay good money to move heavy things and run in circles. And I love it. It might not be your thing, but you see it in other hobbies too: learning to play an instrument, gardening, painting, dancing, playing sport.
At work, the link between effort and outcomes is often weak, or broken.
When effort stops feeling worth it
The same researchers, Inzlicht, Shenhav and Olivola, are clear about when the effect breaks down: effort stops adding value when it consistently goes unrewarded.
We can see this state in the APS (Australian Public Service) Employee Census, possibly the largest workforce data set in Australia, with 1.45 million responses over the past 14 years. When someone's workload is above capacity, but the job doesn't use their skills? They're 2.5 times more likely to report burnout. About 11% were in that state in the APS in 2025: plenty of work, but not much that challenges their skills or builds their expertise.
This isn't a rare state either. In a global workforce report published in September 2026, Korn Ferry found 45% of workers agreed they were "too busy to deliver meaningful results". This climbed to 49% for CEOs.
This state is more likely the larger and more tangled the organisation. In a small team, you more often see the impact of your work. Add enough layers, handoffs, shared systems and stakeholders, and your impact can become invisible. It's a side effect of complexity, which hides progress.
Why does this happen? Duplicate systems. Approvals that exist because nobody has been allowed to remove them. Priorities that change every few weeks. Work that exists to feed a report nobody opens. Poor processes create work with no real progress involved.
What makes the difference
Research finds that when effort is consistently rewarded, effort itself can become its own reward (Inzlicht, Shenhav and Olivola). Pair hard work with reward enough times, and the hard part stops registering purely as a cost.
That's the useful version of what people mean when they talk about enjoying the hard stuff. It gets built through repetition. Which means it can also be dismantled by experience.
At work, outcomes do need to be a priority. But ignoring effort that didn't create the outcome we were hoping for risks teaching a different lesson: that effort and reward aren't really connected here. What do you want people to remember the next time you ask them to take on something challenging?
So what counts as rewarded? Less than you'd think.
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer asked 238 people across 26 project teams in seven companies to keep a diary every working day. That's close to 12,000 entries. On people's best days, progress showed up 76% of the time. On their worst days, setbacks dominated 67% of the time.
Which brings us back to those 669 managers. Same researchers, separate survey. They put recognition for good work at the top and support for making progress at the bottom. The employees' diaries showed it was the other way around.
Making progress on meaningful work brightens inner work life and boosts long-term performance. Amabile and Kramer, 2011
The APS data points the same way. Across 151,000 people in 106 agencies, people report being recognised for outcomes around 70% of the time. For finding new and better ways of working, about 64%. For effort on something that didn't go to plan, about 48%. At the moment, recognition falls the further you get from a result. It's lowest exactly where the learning is.
Why the last one matters most
This is the part that compounds. Computational neuroscience (Shenhav and others) has used formal models and brain imaging to support something that seems like common sense: it's hard to keep trying when nothing you try appears to make a difference. (I explain this in more detail in Are you recognising the wrong things?)
So what can you do?
Build progress into the work. Can someone tell, without asking anyone, whether they're getting somewhere? Shorter cycles, ownership of a whole piece rather than a fragment, a visible measure that isn't the final outcome. Hackman and Oldham found decades ago that feedback coming from the work itself is one of the core things that makes a job motivating.
Look at your own week. Which of your regular meetings and habits still produce something, and which are running on inertia? If you genuinely can't change them, make sure there's somewhere else in your life where effort visibly pays off. It helps you keep your sense of agency intact. It sounds silly, but when I'm not making progress at work, hitting a new goal in the gym or making progress elsewhere gives me a boost to keep going.
Say what you saw. "I noticed you rewrote that brief three times before it worked" does more than "great job", because it tells someone you were paying attention, and it names something they can repeat.
None of these fix duplicate systems or 11-step approvals, which need their own fixes. What they do is stop good people quietly concluding that effort is pointless.
Is this a challenge you face in your team? Making progress visible is a big part of the work we do with teams. Contact us to talk about it.
