After a few years of small but steady gains, employee engagement and wellbeing have decreased significantly, posing now as one of the main concerns for leaders globally. Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report’ found that the global average is just at about 23%, with the U.S. and Canada placing about 10 percentage points higher, and Europe 10 percentage points lower, ranking last among all regions, with just 13%. You may think that give or take 30% is not that bad.. so let me put it into perspective. The same report estimates it costs the global economy $8.9tn, or 9% of the global GDP — enough to make a difference between success and failure for some of the world’s development goals.

The biggest problem we have currently is — we don’t understand ourselves. This is why we try to address low engagement rates with more tools and training focused on efficiency and productivity, jumping to the conclusion that it’s a matter of a system and organization. We bet on short-sighted solutions when the goal is to create sustained engagement. Instead of fixing the behaviors, we should understand what drives them.

It is an often-quoted fact that motivation is driven by dopamine. And it is not wrong, per se. However, not nearly as often is this presented in a broader context. We’d oversimplify if we focused solely on it. Yet, we don’t do ourselves any favors when we don’t apply what we know about dopamine to create better systems for productivity and engagement. Dopamine doesn’t work in a vacuum and we’re not just at the mercy of it. 

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, meaning it facilitates communication between nerve cells in your brain and the rest of your body. It is involved in memory, attention, cognition, mood, sleep and arousal, motivation, any kind of smooth movement like waving your arm, and even learning. 

Here is where I’d like to make an observation that this so-called „self-care”, that is often dismissed or deprioritized, is not only to favor our personal lives but has a real impact on your drive to maximize your potential. So if you ever thought to yourself that certain simple activities like protecting your teammates' time to take a walk during lunch is a nice-to-have, I hope this article will show you that we, humans, are holistic beings and neglect in one area will surely impact the other parts of our holistic system. Thus, mental health and the well-being of your team should be an integral part of your team development goals. 

Research demonstrates a significant effectiveness gap between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in the workplace. Studies show that intrinsic motives have three times the impact on employee engagement levels compared to extrinsic motives.

McKinsey research revealed that intrinsically motivated employees show 46% higher levels of job satisfaction and 32% greater levels of commitment to their jobs. 

While extrinsic rewards like bonuses can provide short-term compliance and immediate behavioral changes, they often create what researchers call the "undermining effect"—where external rewards actually diminish long-term motivation once removed. Meta-analysis research indicates that there is less than 2% overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels, highlighting that financial incentives have minimal impact on sustained engagement.

In contrast, intrinsic motivation—driven by purpose, autonomy, and mastery—creates lasting behavioral change, enhanced creativity, and sustained high performance, making it the superior approach for complex knowledge work and long-term organizational success.

Honing in on motivation then ... The dopaminergic system functioning as our “reward center”, is more stimulated when anticipating pleasure as opposed to actually experiencing it. And it has the stunning power to reinforce behaviors. As humans, we are hard-wired to seek out these behaviors, which release dopamine. Unfortunately, often, we skew towards extrinsic rewards, which have short-lived effects. 

If the reward (which can be a gain or avoided loss) is closely connected with intrinsic motivations or specific goals, anticipation, and thus, likely sacrifice, is high. If it’s disconnected from our interests, or it is unclear, expect the opposite effect. 

That means, first of all, dopamine has an instantaneous effect and is not meant to last. It fires when triggered. So building motivational systems that are solely based on extrinsic, short-lived, motivators or introducing performance reviews solely reliant on long-term goals, checked upon once a year, and expecting sustained engagement are simply an example of a mismatched action and objective. Extrinsic rewards may work well for compliance matters, but it’s the intrinsic motivation that you need to inspire true engagement. 

Neuroscience reveals that happiness is primarily mediated by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and occurs only in a state of safety, while pleasure is driven by dopamine and can occur in both safe and threatening contexts.

Pleasure means something we want because it feels good temporarily, creating a cycle where 'want' becomes 'need,' while happiness means contentment—feeling good and satisfied without needing more.

Research demonstrates that dopamine's role has shifted from being seen as a direct pleasure creator to functioning more as a motivational force that reinforces remembering and repeating experiences. This explains why dopamine-driven rewards create temporary highs followed by the need for more stimulation, whereas true contentment emerges from neurochemical states involving serotonin and GABA that promote lasting satisfaction.

Understanding this distinction is crucial for leaders seeking to build sustainable engagement rather than short-term behavioral compliance.

Don’t chase the wrong thing. Purpose is the space where sustained engagement is born and nurtured. It turns out that the frequency of Purpose-oriented conversation is also important. Why? As we collaborate with others just focused on the efficiency of achieving the goal, our biological default is the threat response. It is easily triggered and has more lasting effects than the reward response. Leaders are better off running the risk of being a broken record than stating employees’ connection to a higher purpose too few times.

Organizations and their leaders need to embed employees’ connection to a higher purpose into the everyday conversation of the organization — whether it be memos, manuals, brand stories, collateral, or office dialogue. It awakens the desired reward response and the associated levels of positive engagement that ultimately drive business performance.

Motivation to act requires some expectation of success. If skills and talents are thought of as fixed—something people either have or don’t have—an initial failure is likely to be attributed to a lack of natural ability and, in turn, may decrease motivation. But if skills and talents are seen as capacities that can be developed through practice—a growth mindset— then a failure signals the need to develop the skill or talent through continued effort and practice. 

Watch out for how you speak. As a leader, you construct a certain narrative. Starting from random comments referring to what you emphasize when you compliment your team and what you highlight when you talk about the failure. How do you speak about efficiency? What is the narration around problems in your team? Talking about them can be extremely productive if we navigate the discussion towards achieving emotional catharsis, where we feel the emotions, understand them, and use them to sift our perspective. 

Engagement challenges are fundamentally different from operational inefficiencies—they require a deeper understanding of human psychology and the neurobiological drivers of motivation. As this research demonstrates, traditional quick fixes fail because they don't address the underlying neural patterns that create sustained engagement.

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