What moves your people? Tapping into motivation at the unit of one.
What’s the last mile of realizing human performance? Understanding and capitalizing on what makes the people in your organization tick—at an individual level.
Nic Scoble-Williams
Sue Cantrell
John Forsythe
Chloe Domergue
Ben Fish
Understanding what drives people to act can help organizations boost performance, spark innovation, and drive collective action for change. Yet few organizations appear to recognize the power of motivation and take deliberate action to harness it.
Emerging technologies have long been influencing consumer behavior by tapping into motivations in marketing and customer engagement, yielding remarkable results.1 But why aren’t organizations applying the same focus on their workforce? What’s holding them back?
While some organizations may feel their employee value proposition reflects the motivations of their people, it is only by understanding and tapping into motivations at an individual level—the unit of one—that we can truly drive performance. In doing so, organizations can encourage people to do things that they might not want to do, incentivize them to improve their performance and the quality of their work, and create diverse yet unified teams.
Consider the hypothetical case of Jane and Ellen, two high-performing first-level managers who lead IT development projects at a Fortune 500 consumer products company. Not only do Jane and Ellen share the same job title and job description, but they have the same nationality, gender, race, location, and age demographic. What’s more, they both have two children under the age of five and both are perceived as high performers.
When it comes to motivation, however, they couldn’t be more different. Jane is motivated primarily by success, recognition, and financial well-being. Ellen, on the other hand, strives for purpose and meaning. She is motivated by solving difficult problems, leading a balanced life, and improving the lives of colleagues and customers.
Yet despite these differences in motivation, their company treats them largely the same. They’re both offered the same career path toward higher levels of management, even though they have different motivations to grow. They’re both compensated in the same way, without options to opt in to stock options, bonuses, or other alternative compensation methods, even though different combinations of rewards may resonate more deeply with each of them. And they’re both appraised using the same criteria and timeline, even though they have different preferences and needs for feedback.
Jane and Ellen do well by the company and its customers. But both could experience better human outcomes, while also contributing more to their organization’s success, if the organization tapped into the different ways they were motivated.
If we consider that the same holds true for the thousands of other workers in their organization—as well as the countless workers across other organizations around the globe—it becomes clear that organizations may be missing out on a seldom-used lever for unleashing the potential of their people and generating value for their business.
When workers surveyed in Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends research (see “Methodology”) were asked to name their most important rationale for working, they gave a variety of answers, from working to provide for themselves or others to working for the pure enjoyment of the work itself (figure 1).
Whatever their core motivation, most workers are driven by a wide range of motivations on a daily basis and often experience multiple motivations at the same time. Many surveyed workers also said their reasons changed over time: 38% reported that the main factor driving their work has changed over the past three years.
“We are consumers inside and outside of work, and we have come to expect a level of personalization and choice in the workplace that we are provided with outside our work life,” says Jennifer Hornery, senior vice president of global people and culture at Cochlear, highlighting the power of the motivation lever and why it is so important today. “By understanding and catering to motivations at the individual level, we can unleash the potential of each person to advance the aspirations and strategic priorities of the business.”2
Many organizations are already assessing motivations and aspirations at the highest levels, using leadership psychometric assessments to evaluate and cultivate leadership potential. However, advances in technology and data collection now give us the opportunity—and the imperative—to do so for individuals across the organization, harnessing the data at our fingertips to advance outcomes for all workers.
And many workers are now demanding it: According to our 2025 survey, 60% expect their organization to increase their motivation to perform the work that they do. But to do that, organizations should focus on understanding what motivates an individual in the first place.
And although the majority of workers (78%) have clarity as to what motivates them, only about a third (33%) strongly believe their organizations and managers understand their motivations.
What is motivation?
Some researchers define motivation as the general desire or willingness of someone to do something.3
For our purposes, however, we define motivation as the reasons why one behaves or acts in a particular way. These reasons may be conscious or unconscious, rational or emotional, short or long term, internally motivated or externally motivated (figure 3). Put simply, motivations are the driving force that moves the way an individual thinks, acts, and behaves.
It should also be noted that motivations aren’t static. Rather, they will inevitably change based on the contexts in which they arise, with the same person motivated by one factor in one situation and a completely different factor in another situation.4
The last mile of influencing worker behavior
Leaders recognize the need for customization: More than two-thirds of leaders in our survey (67%) say that customizing the design and experience of work and workforce practices based on worker skills, behavioral patterns, motivations, passions, work styles, and more is important (figure 4). But they’re struggling to make progress. Many organizations may try to achieve this customization by segmenting workers based on demographics like generation, roles, or geography—often using personas, for example—to tailor practices.
However, as highlighted in the example of Jane and Ellen above, while segmentation is quick and cost-effective, it can miss important motivational differences and even perpetuate stereotypes. To avoid these pitfalls and go the “last mile” of truly connecting with workers in ways that move them most toward positive outcomes, organizations should tap into motivation at the unit of one: the individual worker as a unique human being.
This approach is what we call hyper-personalization, in which customization happens at the granular, individual level. Fifty-five percent of leaders say it is critically or very important to use new technologies to hyper-personalize how they influence workers based on their motivations, yet only 5% are leading in this area—and only 17% have efforts underway.
In order for organizations to make progress toward motivation at the unit of one, leaders will likely need to find balance in the inevitable tensions between standardization and personalization, as well as between centralized control and individual autonomy and empowerment (figure 5).
Achieving motivation at the unit of one
Motivation at the unit of one is a game changer for achieving human performance—the mutually reinforcing cycle of business and human outcomes. It challenges organizations to understand what truly moves their workers to act—or fail to act—in the ways they do, enabling hyper-personalized strategies that are purposefully tailored to individual motivations.
While many organizations are now seeking to better understand workers as more than just “job holders” and recognize their diverse portfolio of skills in what we call a “skills-based organization” approach, few are combining this understanding with data and insights into personal motivations, interests, passions, and needs. Johnson & Johnson, however, is pioneering this approach.
Beyond the skills-based organization: Johnson & Johnson’s whole-person approach
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) recently shifted beyond a strictly skills-based approach to a whole-person model that considers skills, experiences, aspirations, traits, and motivations.
J&J recognizes that workers might be motivated by a variety of factors, none of which are mutually exclusive. These might include monetary rewards, the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology, a desire to improve the lives of patients and customers, or a desire to be constantly challenged. The organization collects worker data largely through worker-directed profiles and psychometric tests, then encourages workers and managers to bring insights from this data into one-on-one check-ins and workforce planning conversations to determine what work and roles best suit the workers.
“The power is in the workers’ hands, but always with clarity around what the organization needs and values,” said Christina Norris-Watts, J&J’s head of assessment and people practices. “We’ve always assessed top-level leaders on their traits, aspirations, and motivations. Now we’re trying to extend this assessment to all workers and combine that data with skills and experience data to make better decisions about our workforce.”5
Tapping into motivation as a means of influencing worker behavior to realize both human and business outcomes requires two broad steps: Understanding worker motivations through the collection and analysis of data, and using hyper-personalization approaches to act on that data in ways that create value for workers and the organization (figure 6).
Understand individual motivations
The first step in harnessing worker motivation to unleash human performance is embracing a multimodal approach to collecting and understanding workers’ varied motivations. Self-reported worker data—through traditional approaches such as surveys, focus groups, or prompts to enter information into a workforce portal—while useful, has limitations. Workers may be hesitant to reveal the full extent of their feelings, motivations, and preferences regarding their work and employer due to fear of organizational blowback. Further, workers may claim to feel one way about their work while acting in ways that suggest other, hidden, motivations.
Consider how self-reported data, like the type we collected in our survey, can often point to conflicting motivations. For example, while only 13% of workers we surveyed said their core motivation to work was for tangible rewards, these same workers ranked financial rewards as the top motivator that drives them to perform at a high level every day. Often, workers aren’t fully aware of what motivates them to behave the way they do.
As advancements in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies continue to accelerate, organizations have the opportunity to emulate the success seen in marketing and consumer engagement. Organizations can go beyond self-reporting to observe and infer individual worker motivations, in real time and at scale. A suite of technologies, from eye-tracking to machine learning to voice AI, are starting to understand people more deeply, including why they behave the way they do and the emotions affecting their motivations.
Many organizations already have a wealth of worker data available, but it has been in isolated repositories and thus not fully utilized. In J&J’s case, leaders realized that data they had been sitting on for over a decade could be brought together using generative AI and other tools to enable a holistic and deeper understanding of workers at an individual level, including their motivations and other individual data like skills, interests, passions, work styles, and preferences.6 That understanding could then be applied to solving specific business challenges.
Collecting such data from workers, especially if done passively through technology, should be performed responsibly, however, to build trust. While workers increasingly seek hyper-personalized experiences, they also want their data privacy protected and their data collected only if it benefits them. A significant 69% of workers are comfortable with organizations knowing more about them if it leads to better communication tailored to their needs. Our research around “transparency paradox” has also highlighted that workers are more likely to share their data and trust their organizations when they are given a choice to opt in to data collection, receive clear benefits, and see transparent data practices in action.
Whether the organization uses AI, analytics, or simple human judgment, this data can then be turned into insights to help the data “speak” and drive the hyper-personalization of a wide variety of workforce strategies and outcomes.
Act on individual motivations by identifying use cases and selecting a hyper-personalized approach
Insights into what makes an individual tick can be applied to a variety of different use cases, from tailored communications and improved work performance to accelerated career development. In choosing where to start, organizations and workers should collaborate to identify the areas where strategies to motivate at the unit of one will have the greatest impact in improving business and human outcomes.
In addition to prioritizing what outcomes to prioritize and why, organizations will also need to decide how to hyper-personalize based on one or a combination of different approaches, each of which has various trade-offs.7 It is important to recognize that none of these approaches can stand on their own, but rather need to be part of a systematic framework focused on understanding and harnessing worker motivation.
Manager-driven approaches
Manager-driven approaches empower managers to hyper-personalize their interactions with individuals based on specific motivations. Johnson & Johnson’s whole-person approach, described in the sidebar, is an example of a manager-driven approach.
Another organization using this approach is Unilever, where managers support workers as they develop an individualized “Future-fit Plan” that charts the worker’s desired path for the next 18 months, potentially including destinations outside Unilever. To develop their plan, workers discuss their motivations and aspirations with managers in one-on-one conversations. Managers then help connect workers with personalized learning, coaching, mentoring, and networking opportunities via Unilever’s online learning hub and with access to relevant work opportunities via the company’s Flex Experiences Program. This approach has led to a more motivated workforce: 92% of workers with a Future-fit Plan report having jobs that inspire them to go the extra mile, compared with only 33% of those without.8
Manager-driven approaches require little or no investment, but they are dependent on the ability of managers to be effective people developers. Variation in this capability among different managers within the same organization may cause fairness concerns for workers.
Modular approaches
Modular approaches provide workers with a set of options to choose from based on their personal motivations. These approaches are common in consumer marketing. Consider, for example, how some coffee shops offer a variety of modular components—syrups, milk types, and espresso shots—that can be combined to meet customers’ desire for personalization and self-expression, all while enabling them to manage customization at scale.
Organizations adopting a modular approach to compensation, for example, empower employees to customize their rewards to create hyper-personalized packages based on unique personal motivations. Some offer flexibility in choosing between cash, stock options, or restricted stock units with different vesting schedules.9 Others let employees decide between a lower salary with a potential for a higher bonus, or a higher salary with a smaller bonus possibility. These customizable options can help ensure that compensation packages align with individual preferences and aspirations, fostering a more motivated and satisfied workforce.
Modular choice can be applied to a wide range of other workforce practices as well. For instance, talent marketplaces can empower workers by offering them a selection of discrete projects that align with their motivations, allowing them to supplement their core duties with modular assignments. One global insurer created an internal marketplace for data scientists, where they could be flexibly assigned to modular projects across the organization based on their interests, motivations, skills, and capacity, eliminating the need for traditional core jobs altogether.10
Modular approaches can transform time management, too. In Japan, Panasonic offers four-day work weeks, allowing workers to choose how they use the fifth day based on their unique motivations—be it for rest, personal appointments, hobbies, reskilling, side jobs, community service, or deep-thinking work.11 Similarly, Land O’Lakes offers workers a choice between standard full-time work or flex roles in which they set their own shift schedules and total hours. Previously, all workers had to complete 12-hour shifts to support 24-hour production. Though this modular approach requires more time for scheduling and has led to hiring additional staff, it has significantly boosted employee retention and attraction.12
Modular approaches can provide greater organizational control than other approaches and are often seen as fairer, since all workers are given the same choices. However, they are also less personalized, and the options on offer may be too limited to be relevant to some workers.
Managing fairness and unity when motivating at the unit of one
As organizations hyper-personalize practices and solutions based on individuals’ unique motivations, questions of fairness might be raised when people’s work experiences now vary from person to person. However, a significant amount of research has shown that when there is a fair process (known as “procedural justice”), accommodating for differences can actually lead to higher levels of fairness.13 When all workers are empowered with tailored tools and the opportunities they need to individually perform at their best, they may not be treated exactly the same, but they will have equal opportunity.
Likewise, while hyper-personalized strategies may create a perception of compromising team and organizational unity, organizations pursuing motivation at the unit of one can and should balance a focus on the individual with an understanding of the larger system, knowing that motivation happens at all levels. When people practices vary from person to person, other types of organizational “glue” may be needed to create a sense of unity, such as organizationwide values when adopting microcultures.
Tech-driven approaches
New advances in workforce technology, modeled on similar advances in consumer marketing technology, can help organizations better understand individuals’ motivations by collecting behavioral and emotional data to provide hyper-personalized experiences for workers.
At Swissport, leadership recognized the need to forge deeper connections between their frontline workforce and the company's mission, values and organizational goals by tapping into their workers’ behaviors and motivations. Through the Firstup intelligent communication platform, they implemented sophisticated personalization strategies inspired by consumer marketing approaches that deliver tailored, meaningful content to each worker. The platform analyzes behavioral data that then provides advanced customization approaches to optimize everything from message timing and content to format and language preferences for each worker. In addition, utilizing communication fatigue metrics, Swissport can fine-tune message frequency at an individual level, ensuring engagement without overwhelming its workforce.14
Neuroavatar technology, for example, can be used to hyper-personalize interactions based on individuals’ top motivational needs, like power, connection, or stability. Borrowing from consumer marketing techniques, actors are scanned and digitized to dynamically hyper-personalize communications. AI helps these avatars continually adapt their tone and approach, tailoring training or messages to individual preferences and motivations. For example, during the post-merger integration of a German group into an American listed company, neuro-avatars were used to tailor training on new external financial reporting requirements for the newly acquired workforce, accelerating onboarding and ensuring compliance with SEC deadlines.15
Technology can also help organizations understand and respond to unconscious, emotion-based motivations. For instance, using a platform from IHP Analytics, a trading firm tracked traders’ stress levels through wearables and combined this data with individual trading performance metrics. The platform revealed how stress slowed response time and led to worse decisions, negatively affecting profit. Personalized dashboards showed individual traders how to reduce stress by adjusting their trading screens, practicing emotional regulation, and increasing self-awareness of their individual risk profile. As a result, 98% of traders felt more focused and supported, experiencing a 9% improvement in well-being and an 18% increase in retention over the next 12 months. Additionally, the firm saw an estimated 3% gain in net profit by managing unconscious behavioral drivers more effectively.16
Tech-driven approaches may require more investment than other approaches. They may also raise privacy concerns. However, they can offer a greater degree of hyper-personalization than other approaches, and they can help an organization scale hyper-personalization strategies with impact at speed.
Small steps, big results
Motivating at the unit of one doesn’t necessarily require big budgets, massive change, or large technology investments. Organizations can get started now by simply asking managers to better understand their workers’ unique motivations and tailor their feedback, development plans, or other practices accordingly. No matter the strategy used, organizations that let the data speak can gain a better understanding of what drives each individual to act the way they do, giving them the power to unlock human performance.
As you consider how to harness your people’s potential to compete in today’s human-powered economy, don’t forget that it is the unique motivations of individual workers that move them to act the way they do. Your business—and your workers—are counting on it.
Research methodology
Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey polled nearly 10,000 business and human resources leaders across many industries and sectors in 93 countries. In addition to the broad, global survey that provides the foundational data for the Global Human Capital Trends report, Deloitte supplemented its research this year with worker-, manager-, and executive-specific surveys to uncover where there may be gaps between leader and manager perception and worker realities. The survey data is complemented by more than 25 interviews with executives from some of today’s leading organizations. These insights helped shape the trends in this report.
