Have you ever heard of the phenomenon of quiet quitting? It describes people who no longer like what they do, but do not leave. They are still there, just indifferent, going through the motions. A kind of protest, without ever taking action. When you read about disengagement at work, almost every proposed fix seems to involve doing something to people rather than changing anything about the work itself. It made me think about an interesting design question:
How do you design work that people are actually engaged in? And how much of what we call a motivation problem is really a structure problem?
This is how I came across a company called Buurtzorg, a Dutch home-care organisation. The conventional response to disengagement is to add motivational layers on top of the work: bonuses, recognition schemes, team-building days, engagement surveys. Buurtzorg did almost the opposite. Founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok, it organises its nurses into small, self-governing teams of ten to twelve who look after the home care of fifty to sixty patients in a neighbourhood, with no manager above them, on the simple premise that trained professionals know how to do their work. It became the organisation with the most satisfied workforce in the country. The engagement did not come from a programme. It came from the structure of the work.The behavioural science here is about where genuine, lasting motivation actually comes from.
People are most engaged not when they are rewarded or exhorted, but when their work gives them three things: a real say over how they do it, genuine connection to the people around them, and the sense that they are good at it.
Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan built decades of evidence that these three, autonomy, relatedness and competence, are what produce motivation that comes from within, and that they are set by how work is structured, not by the size of the bonus. Buurtzorg's nurses are engaged because the design hands them all three.
This is Behavioural Design applied to motivation itself. You do not lecture people into caring more, or buy their engagement with perks. You design work that gives people control, connection and mastery, and the engagement follows from the structure. So how do you put this to work? Here are three practical moves:
Hand people real control over how they work. Engagement collapses when every method is dictated from above. Give a team genuine say over how they reach an outcome, not just responsibility for hitting it, and watch how differently they show up.
Build connection into the work, not into the away-day. Relatedness is one of the deepest drivers of motivation. Structure the work so people genuinely rely on and help one another, rather than trying to manufacture it once a year in a team-building exercise.
Design for mastery, not just delivery. People disengage from work they never get visibly better at. Build in the chance to grow a real skill and to see that growth, because competence felt is competence that motivates. By the way, an entire chapter in my book ‘De Gelukscode’ is about mastery if you want read more about this. In Dutch only, I am afraid.
I will admit my first instinct, when a team loses energy, is still to want to do something to them. A talk, a treat, a team day. Buurtzorg is my reminder that the better move is usually to change the work, and then get out of the way.
Behavioural Design Summer School
Two days in Amsterdam with Tom and Astrid, and a small group of people ready to be more influential by September.
Day one builds a working Behavioural Design × AI workflow you can use from the following week. Day two: two masterclasses based on the founders' books, one on designing for happiness and energy, one on finding the leverage points that unlock stuck change.
Dinner together on the first evening. A follow-up session three months later. Both books included.
🇳🇱 6 & 7 augustus 2026 · Dutch edition - waitlist only!
🇬🇧 20 & 21 August 2026 · English edition - only 3 spots left!
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The fundamental attribution error: why we blame the person, not the situation
You have probably caught yourself concluding that a colleague who dropped the ball is simply careless, while explaining your own slip as the result of an impossible week. This lopsided habit has a name: the fundamental attribution error:
Our tendency to explain other people's behaviour by their character and our own by our circumstances. We see the person and miss the situation they were standing in.
The reason is that another person's situation is invisible to us, while their behaviour is right there, so we pin everything on the visible part: them. The correction, used deliberately, is one of the most useful habits in working life. The next time someone underperforms, before you decide who they are, ask what they are standing in: what the workload, the tools, the incentives, the unclear brief were doing to them. You will be right more often, and fairer, and you will start fixing situations instead of blaming people.
Most behaviour you dislike is a situation talking, so look at the situation before you judge the person.
Here's to the stubborn optimists, who unlock the power of Behavioural Design for optimising work, life, and everything in between.
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
Source:
KPMG (2015). The added value of Buurtzorg relative to other providers of home care. Underlying science: Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. (1985, 2000). Self-determination theory: autonomy, relatedness and competence as the basis of intrinsic motivation.
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