Clearing the path and making sure they can taste meaningful victory.
Work is inherently demotivating. Value is its antidote and its certainly not as intrinsic as the exhaustion and apathy from labor. It's always a social construct but must not be manufactured.
Instead be a protector and guarantor of the most possible reality based on available evidence
some parts of our work are demotivating. From my experience building houses, software, mechanical tools are intrinsically very motivating. Dealing with slow JIRA is demotivating, and many other stuff coming from, and especially through, managers is demotivating.
>apathy from labor
sure. The starting point though is all the stuff which converts work into labor.
"Habits maketh the man" and thus i guess "micro-habit maketh the micro-manager"
"What's wrong?" Asks the doctor as the man continues to weep.
"Doctor," the man says, "I am the JIRA administrator."
Turning up every day to some mini hellscape created by nasty people and money / need for money then becomes the only reward. Those are the biggest causes of demotivation right there.
Prime example: deliberate hiring to fire. No one should be advocating that. Its incompetance. A real ethical organisation would be investigating who hired the person and who managed the person. Then seriously consider firing them as well. Minimum action is to reduce rewards, eg bonuses, as penalty. Hiring done well is expensive. Hiring poorly implies something bad in the hiring process. Why tolerate that?