Quiet quitting: how to design work people are engaged in

Have you ever heard of the phenomenon of quiet quitting? It describes people who no longer like what they do, but do not leave. They are still there, just indifferent, going through the motions. A kind of protest, without ever taking action. When you read about disengagement at work, almost every proposed fix seems to involve doing something to people rather than changing anything about the work itself. It made me think about an interesting design question:

How do you design work that people are actually engaged in? And how much of what we call a motivation problem is really a structure problem?

This is how I came across a company called Buurtzorg, a Dutch home-care organisation. The conventional response to disengagement is to add motivational layers on top of the work: bonuses, recognition schemes, team-building days, engagement surveys. Buurtzorg did almost the opposite. Founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok, it organises its nurses into small, self-governing teams of ten to twelve who look after the home care of fifty to sixty patients in a neighbourhood, with no manager above them, on the simple premise that trained professionals know how to do their work. It has repeatedly been named best employer in the Netherlands in its size category. The engagement did not come from a programme. It came from the structure of the work. The behavioural science here is about where genuine, lasting motivation actually comes from.

People are most engaged not when they are rewarded or exhorted, but when their work gives them three things: a real say over how they do it, genuine connection to the people around them, and the sense that they are good at it.

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan built decades of evidence that these three, autonomy, relatedness and competence, are what produce motivation that comes from within, and that they are set by how work is structured, not by the size of the bonus. Buurtzorg's nurses are engaged because the design hands them all three.

This is Behavioural Design applied to motivation itself. You do not lecture people into caring more, or buy their engagement with perks. You design work that gives people control, connection and mastery, and the engagement follows from the structure. So how do you put this to work? Here are three practical moves:

• Hand people real control over how they work. Engagement collapses when every method is dictated from above. Give a team genuine say over how they reach an outcome, not just responsibility for hitting it, and watch how differently they show up.

• Build connection into the work, not into the away-day. Relatedness is one of the deepest drivers of motivation. Structure the work so people genuinely rely on and help one another, rather than trying to manufacture it once a year in a team-building exercise.

• Design for mastery, not just delivery. People disengage from work they never get visibly better at. Build in the chance to grow a real skill and to see that growth, because competence felt is competence that motivates. By the way, an entire chapter in my book ‘De Gelukscode’ is about mastery if you want read more about this. In Dutch only, I am afraid.

I will admit my first instinct, when a team loses energy, is still to want to do something to them. A talk, a treat, a team day. Buurtzorg is my reminder that the better move is usually to change the work, and then get out of the way.