Employees aren't lazy. They're disillusioned with being given pointless work.

You have probably done it. You stayed late, or gave up part of a weekend, to finish a report. You sent it on Monday morning and never heard another word. Nobody said it was useful, nobody said it was wrong, and nobody said what happened to it. The next time you were asked for a report, you did an adequate job, but not your best.

Most people recognise that feeling. What surprises them is that it can be measured, and that the effect is large.

The Lego experiment

In 2008 three researchers, Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica and Drazen Prelec, paid Harvard students to build small Lego figures. The first figure paid $2.00, and each one after that paid 11 cents less. The students could stop whenever they liked.

The two groups differed in only one way: what happened to the finished figures. In one group, each completed figure stayed on the desk, and the row grew as they worked. In the other, the researcher took each figure apart in front of the student while the student built the next one.

The students whose work was kept built 10.6 figures on average. The students who watched their work being taken apart built 7.2, about a third fewer. The pay rate was the same and the task was the same. The only thing that changed was whether the effort left anything behind.

It isn't a one-off

One study makes a good story, but it is not enough to act on. The pattern has since been found again. In 2026 Yilin Liu and Fan Yang published four experiments in Psychological Science, with children aged four to nine and with adults. Participants built shapes such as hearts from puzzle pieces, and were told either that their creation would be saved in a box or that it would be taken apart or shredded.

The clearest difference came when people could either build another shape or simply move the pieces into a box without building anything. Of the adults who expected their work to be kept, 83% chose to build; of those who expected it to be taken apart, 34% did. Among the children the figures were over 80% and about 50%. The researchers also tried making the task more fun. That helped, but it did not make up for the work being thrown away.

The signal that made the difference was tiny. A small piece of artwork going into a box was enough. It did not need to be important; it only needed to last.

Paid workers show the same thing. In a 2013 study, Dana Chandler and Adam Kapelner hired about 2,500 online workers to label medical images. Some were told they were helping researchers identify tumour cells, some were told nothing, and some were told their work would be discarded. The workers who knew the purpose did more. The workers told their work would be thrown away did as much, but less carefully.

When initiatives die quietly

I saw a larger version of this many times at Cisco. Senior management would push out initiatives that had no real momentum behind them. Many were window dressing, and you could tell which ones were not going to last the journey. After a huge amount of effort and work, they faded away, and no one ever discussed them again.

It is not just my experience. In 2016 the average employee went through two planned company-wide changes in a year; by 2022 it was ten. Over the same period, the share of employees willing to support change fell from 74% to 43%.

Leaders can see the result. In 2025 more than a third of leaders told the research firm Gartner that their teams "hesitate and delay action until they see whether changes will last". People have learned to spot the programme of the month, and they hold back their effort until it proves itself.

That caution is learned at work. In a study at one manufacturing plant, employees who had watched a string of programmes launched and then dropped had come to expect that nothing would change. The researchers found that the workplace explained this cynicism better than the employees' personalities did.

What this is costing you

The Lego and puzzle studies were not run in an office, so applying them to everyday work is my own step. The workplace research points the same way, though. Many organisations may be taking apart people's work in front of them every week, without meaning to. It happens in familiar ways:

• the report that goes to a senior team and is never mentioned again;
• the draft that comes back rewritten with no explanation;
• the project cancelled in a one-line email after months of work;
• the analysis prepared for a meeting that is then postponed indefinitely.

The damage is easy to miss because people keep doing their jobs. A combined analysis of 41 studies, covering more than 23,000 people, found that when employees felt promises at work had been broken, their trust and commitment fell sharply, while their core job performance barely moved. What disappears is the extra effort: the idea nobody asked for, and the problem fixed before anyone noticed it.

Many organisations also carry what one 2026 survey called "zombie projects": alive on paper, but going nowhere. Of 8,000 office workers surveyed, 44% started the year weighed down by them, and more than a third feared being judged if they cancelled one. The survey was run for a company that sells project software, so the figure is a pointer rather than proof, but the pattern will be familiar.

The quiet version: rustout

Not everyone who is disillusioned looks unhappy. Some of the most reliable people in a team are under-used, meet every target and slowly stop caring. Sabrina Fitzsimons, a lecturer at Dublin City University, calls this rustout, and describes it as "a breakdown in the relationship between effort and meaningful work". Her advice is that a person in this state may need different work, not less work.

Meaning matters for the individual as well as the team. A three-year study of 1,239 frontline health and social care workers in the UK and Ireland found that those who saw meaning in their work had less burnout. Those still searching for it, especially without finding it, had more. The study shows a link rather than a cause, but it points the same way as everything above.

But don't people simply dislike hard work?

They do, up to a point. In 2024 a team of researchers combined 170 studies covering 4,670 people in 29 countries. Across every kind of task, the harder people had to think, the more unpleasant they found it. One of the authors, Erik Bijleveld, suggests that people may choose demanding tasks "despite the effort, not because of it".

Yet people choose hard work all the time. Psychologists call this the effort paradox: effort is a cost, but we also value things more because we worked for them. A 2026 review by Nathalie André and colleagues argues that the old "law of least effort" holds mainly when the rewards on offer are equal. It notes that infants try harder after watching an adult persist, and that six-year-olds smile more after difficult achievements than after easy ones.

My reading of both findings is simple. Do not expect people to enjoy hard work. Give them a reason to put it in, and one of the simplest reasons is showing them that it counts.

Questions worth asking

A few honest questions show how much of this is happening around you.

• How many of the reports your team produced last quarter were read, used or answered?
• When did you last tell someone what happened to a piece of their work?
• How many initiatives launched in the last two years has anyone formally closed?
• Which task have you been putting off yourself, and is it because you suspect nobody will use the result?
• At home, what happens to the things your children make with real effort?

What you can do this week

Everything in this section is a suggestion of mine, drawn from the research rather than tested by it. Each one takes minutes and costs nothing.

Suggestion

If you lead a team

• Say why it matters and where it fits. When you hand over a task, tell the person why it matters, who will use the result and what it will be used for.
• Close the loop. When the work has been used, tell the person what happened to it, even in a single sentence.
• Explain your changes. When you rewrite someone's draft, add a line saying why, so they can see their work was read.
• Stop work early. If a piece of work is no longer needed, say so straight away rather than letting someone finish it.
• Decide how an initiative will end before you launch it. Agree what success looks like, when you will judge it, and who decides whether it continues.
• Close initiatives openly. When one ends, say so, explain why, and thank the people who worked on it, rather than letting it fade.
• Check last month's work. List the reports your team produced last month and ask how many were read or used. Stop producing the ones that were not, and close any project that is going nowhere.

Suggestion

For yourself

• Write one line before you start. Before a task you have been avoiding, write down who will use the result and what they will do with it. Then notice whether it is easier to start.
• Ask if you cannot write that line. Go back to the person who asked for the work and find out what it is for, or whether it is needed at all.
• Ask who owns it. Before you put effort into a new initiative, ask who owns it and how its success will be judged.
• Ask what happened. A week after you hand something in, ask how it was used.
• Notice rustout. If you are meeting every target but no longer care, ask your manager for different work, not less work.

Suggestion

At home

• Keep what they make. When a child makes something with real effort, keep it, display it or photograph it, and tell them why.
• Explain before you ask. Tell children why a chore matters to the family before you ask for help, not after they complain.

Sources

• Ariely, D., Kamenica, E., & Prelec, D. (2008). Man's search for meaning: The case of Legos. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 67, 671 to 677.
• Liu, Y., & Yang, F. (2026). Moved by the lightest touch of meaning: Even minimal significance matters for motivation from childhood. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/09567976261462874
• Chandler, D., & Kapelner, A. (2013). Breaking monotony with meaning: Motivation in crowdsourcing markets. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, 123 to 133.
• David, L., Vassena, E., & Bijleveld, E. (2024). The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect. Psychological Bulletin.
• Inzlicht, M., Shenhav, A., & Olivola, C. Y. (2018). The effort paradox: Effort is both costly and valued. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(4), 337 to 349.
• André, N., Baumeister, R. F., Gendolla, G. H. E., & Audiffren, M. (2026). Do people really avoid effort? A cost-benefit perspective on the principle of least effort. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 183, 106587.
• O Morain, C., & Aykens, P. (2023). Employees are losing patience with change initiatives. Harvard Business Review, 9 May.
• Gartner (2025). Just 32% of business leaders report achieving healthy change adoption by employees. Press release, 8 July.
• Wanous, J. P., study of cynicism about organisational change at a manufacturing plant, as reported in IndustryWeek, "Viewpoint: A case of cynicism".
• Topa Cantisano, G., Morales Domínguez, J. F., & Depolo, M. (2008). Psychological contract breach and outcomes: Combining meta-analysis and structural equation models. Psicothema, 20(3), 487 to 496.
• Atlassian (2026). Zombie projects. Survey with Censuswide, 26 January.
• Fitzsimons, S. (2026). You might be experiencing rustout, not burnout, at work. Greater Good Magazine, 9 September.
• Sumner, R. C., Kinsella, E. L., & van Tilburg, W. A. P. (2026). The dynamics of meaning in life and their associations with burnout within and between persons. Journal of Health Psychology. doi:10.1177/13591053261460983