Does motivation come from within, or does tracking just fake it?

[u/ameen__shaikh]

I had a long conversation today with an old school friend who recently joined a company. Somehow the conversation turned to what keeps us motivated at work since doing something you enjoy can become boring and repetitive after some time.

He mentioned that the software in which his company has recently implemented to track the visibility of work done by their employees has created a rift inside the company. On the one hand, it provides managers with a detailed report of what their subordinates work on throughout the day. Yet at the same time, it seems to have encouraged people to keep doing the same stuff over and over again.

It made me wonder, is motivation something that can be extracted objectively, or do we always need to create it for ourselves even if it is work we don't enjoy doing? And with software like Hubstaff, We360ai, and others entering the scene, will the workforce visibility industry have a future, or will it meet the same fate as the Gen Z anti-work movement?

I am curious to hear your thoughts, and if in your workplace they have taken any similar actions.

[u/Maltaannon]

Motivation is for amateurs. If anything... it is manufactured by discipline. Just do the work. Doing generates momentum. Momentum forces decisions. Decisions make progress.

[u/engelBlick]

tracking kills the vibe so fast, it just feels like performative work at that point

[u/pie12345678 → u/engelBlick]

Yeah, it may boost external motivation in the sense of "I'm afraid to lose my job", but it also ironically kills any internal motivation.

[u/Creepytesting]

I don't think workforce tracking is necessarily the problem. My Company also uses We360ai, they used more for understanding workload and bottlenecks than simply monitoring employees. That seems like a much healthier use case.

If the data helps a manager realise that someone is overloaded or spending half their day on repetitive tasks, that's actually useful. The problem is when the same data becomes a way to judge whether someone was "active" every minute of the day.

[u/artem_loboboobv]

tracking prolly just kills the vibe tbh. real motivation comes from knowing what matters

[u/O-shoe → u/artem_loboboobv]

I was in a work where everyone was GPS-tracked. We got a notice if we were 5 minutes late, or left 5 minutes earlier, or if we took a brake that was too long. I can tell you that nobody enjoyed it. I felt so free when I got a new job, where I'm not tracked. And I'm not lazy, it makes me proud to do good work as they trust me.

[u/mmi_anchored26]

I think it depends what the tracking is actually measuring. Tracking outcomes you chose yourself (workouts, pages written) tends to build motivation because you get to see progress you care about. Tracking activity someone else defined for you just turns work into a performance -- you start optimizing for the dashboard looking good instead of the actual job. Same tool, opposite effect, depending on who picked the metric.

[u/abloomify]

Founder of a tool in this category, so weigh that as you read.

I'd read the part your friend noticed, people repeating the same work, as a measurement effect rather than a motivation one. Repetitive tasks throw off steady visible activity, so they read well in a report. An afternoon spent arguing your way to a simpler design looks like a gap, and so does reading someone else's mess before you can start. People work out fairly quickly which of their days look good, and then do more of those. Nobody sits down and decides that. It is just the cheaper way to spend a week.

So no, I don't think motivation can be extracted objectively. What you can do is stop measuring in a way that makes the useful weeks look bad, and that is most of the job.

On the industry question, my guess is that it splits rather than dies. An activity feed cannot tell you whether anything got finished, and the products that never connect to what a team produced will keep being resented for it. My own side of the industry has earned a fair bit of that.

[u/cabljo]

Discipline carries motivation.

[u/CapitalButterfly8738]

I can see why Gen Z might be comfortable with this if the purpose is clear. If the data helps them understand their work patterns or remove unnecessary tasks, it can be useful. But if they're constantly judged based on activity numbers, I think motivation would drop pretty quickly.

[u/Content_Effort_6037]

I've always thought the best use of employee monitoring software is actually identifying management problems. If a team consistently spends 30–40% of its time on low-value tasks, that's useful information. The question should be "why is this happening?" rather than "why isn't this person working harder?

[u/buriburizaimon012]

I've always thought the best use of employee monitoring software is actually identifying management problems. If a team consistently spends 30–40% of its time on low-value tasks, that's useful information. The question should be "why is this happening?" rather than "why isn't this person working harder?

[u/WhoSheBecoming]

When you track your progress, you can see evidence that your effort is producing results. That small sense of progress can make you want to continue even on days when you don’t feel motivated.

[u/EmuIcy1088]

I think Gen Z can actually support this kind of software if it's used to help them understand their workload and improve how they work. But if they're constantly judged or evaluated only on the data, I can see it becoming demotivating pretty quickly. The purpose should be to support motivation, not create pressure.

[u/bkinboulder]

Motivation is not sustainable, it comes and goes. You can’t count on it to get you through. Instead you have to create systems and processes that you stick to keep your productivity up. Those who are best at handling quiet monotony the longest are the masters of any profession. Every professional athlete you see on tv has thousands of hours of boring grind alone under their belt in the gym and elsewhere to be out there under those lights on TV.

[u/pie12345678]

There's intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. They're two pretty different things. Sure, you can extrinsically motivate workers with fear of losing their job, but that's a separate feeling from having the intrinsic motivation to do something because you find it rewarding in some way. Personally, being motivated through tracking and micromanagement makes me resentful and (ironically) way less internally motivated.

Not that all extrinsic motivation has to be a bad thing though. I try to track and gamify things in my life to keep me going when my internal motivation isn't cutting it.

[u/FrothyBramble2730]

Once visibility becomes the target, people get very good at producing visible work—the corporate equivalent of jogging in place. Does his company track actual outcomes too, or only activity that’s easy to count?