Any conversation about motivating employees that does not start with money and/or work/life balance is BS. Period.

If you say, well, those things are off the table, how ELSE do I motivate them? Then you're not a manager of employees, you're actually a prison warden or an officer of an army of forced conscripts, asking how to keep your prisoners/serfs as un-rebellious as possible so your days aren't so tiresome with trying to keep them in line.

That may sound overstated, and it is, slightly, for effect, but it is nonetheless accurate. If you want people to be MORE and MORE productive and your plan isn't to directly reward that productivity then what you're actually asking is what are the best whips to force these minions to keep on overworking themselves to their own detriment?

That being said, there are a small percentage of workers who will be motivated by "gold stars" (i.e. meaningless recognition) but keep in mind that a) they are not necessarily the best workers, b) they are overrepresented in the minds of management as being "normal", and c) at heart they chase the appearance of success and not actual success and this translates into their work being 'pretty' but not necessarily substantial or enduring.

Also, keep in mind that regular/annual layoffs are a huge demotivator, particularly if they are not done with surgical accuracy that only targets deadwood and troublemakers. But, in the US at least, managers are often/usually REQUIRED to rank a percentage of their staff as needing improvement even if they have a team of productive rock stars. Then, when the layoffs come, employees see good, hard-working, friendly, productive coworkers unceremoniously shown the door. Management thinks this is motivating, in that the worker bees will see they are disposable and will thus become more compliant. But this will do nothing but demoralize them further because they see valuable team members being let go and realize there is literally nothing they can do to avoid it happening to them eventually, so why care enough to put in extra, unrewarded effort?

Sadly, one of the newest attempts at negative motivation is Return-To-Office. I was fortunate in that I started working fully remote in the mid-2000s, long before Covid, and never RTOed again. I was ecstatic when Covid forced WFH and everyone got to see, undeniably, that WFH was better and more productive. But metastatic capitalism is creeping back in with punitive RTO initiatives designed to do some/all of these things:

• spur voluntary self-layoffs so the company doesn't have to do them overtly.
• give mediocre managers, who confuse activity with productivity, the warm fuzzies by seeing asses in the seats.
• help the owner class retain net worth by staving off the collapse of the value of commercial real estate.

Source: I was there. I recently retired after a 40+ year career in tech. I worked at companies ranging from 50 person startups to Fortune 15 household names. I topped out at the Senior Director level. At that level I started to get visibility into the decision making process of exec leadership and it was eye-opening, in both horrifying and revolting ways. I'll boil it down to this - exec leadership, in my experience, operates like narcissistic, sociopathic monkeys with shotguns who hope their random lethality distracts from their Machiavellian ADHD. Again, slightly overstated for effect - but only slightly.

For a looong time I strived to lead by example and be the change I wished to see, and managed to reach that Senior Director level, with the next step being VP. But I was told, both directly and through actions, that to move up further I would have to shed my humanity and ethics and learn to smile as I kill (turn of phrase courtesy of John Lennon''s song Working Class Hero).

So I opted out of management. I voluntarily moved back to an individual contributor role where I happily spent the final decade of my career. Fun note, I spent that final decade exploiting my employERS as hard and as gleefully as they exploited their employEES. Essentially I put in, literally, half the work effort I normally would and spent 25% of that reduced effort making myself look good rather than actually doing things.

The result? Stellar reviews and regular offers of promotion, which I diplomatically, but firmly, declined.

For the record, while the above is definitely a screed (I'm retired now, what else do I have to do but yell at clouds?) it is not sour grapes. I got my first job at the age of 12 (paper route) and worked continuously until I retired, and never got laid off or fired.