How to Keep Employees Motivated During Uncertainty

When things get uncertain at work, most managers reach for the same tool. A pep talk. A bigger vision. A slide about where the company is headed.

I understand the reflex. But I think it often misses what people actually need in that moment.

Here's how I see it. People need two things from a leader. Meaning comes first. Security comes right behind it, so close it almost touches. Most of the time that order holds. In a crisis, it doesn't.

In a crisis, security jumps the line

When life is going well for someone, meaning pulls ahead. They want to feel that what they do counts. But when pressure and pain pile up, the need for security catches up and follows meaning around like a shadow.

And in extreme periods, security can pass meaning. Not for long. People adapt, even to very hard things. But that short window is dangerous. It's when people make terrible decisions. They walk away from paths they spent years building.

You've probably seen a version of this at work. A good person, committed for years, suddenly leaves in the middle of a rough period. From the outside it looks sudden. It isn't. Their sense of security dropped under a certain line, and once it did, the vision they believed in stopped feeling worth it, or even possible.

That's the part I want managers to understand. When security falls low enough, inspiration can't reach people. You can't fix a security problem with more meaning.

One more thing, as a warning. Meaning and security together are so strong that people will follow a leader who provides them even when there are clear red flags. I've written about a type of leader who blames everyone else for every failure, and people still stay close to him because of how safe and meaningful he makes them feel. That power is real. Use it with care.

Don't hang their hope on a date

Viktor Frankl, a physician and psychiatrist who wrote about his experiences in the camps of World War II, described something in Man's Search for Meaning that I've never forgotten.

He noticed that before holidays, fewer people died in the camps. Rumors would spread that the war would end by the holiday and everyone would go free. People started making plans for after. As Frankl saw it, that hope gave their suffering a meaning, and that meaning is what let them hold on. Then the holiday came and went, nothing changed, and the death rate jumped. The hope collapsed, and with it the strength people had left.

I'm careful with that story, because nothing in an office compares to it. But the mechanism teaches me something as a leader. Hope tied to a specific date is fragile. If I tell my team "this will be over by the end of the quarter" and I don't control that, I'm borrowing against their trust.

Leadership, as I define it, is the ability to make a vision feel achievable. People can believe in something with all their heart, but if they don't see progress toward it for long enough, belief wears down. The vision starts to feel impossible. So in hard times I'd rather give people real movement than a promised finish line.

Steady yourself before you steady them

Years ago, when my business was just starting to grow, I was flooded with emotions. I had watched a lot of business owners rise and then fall. I knew the mindset I was in could wreck everything at exactly the moment things began to work.

So for a few weeks, nearly every day, I got in my small car and went to sit by the sea. I walked, sat in a cafe, and let everything I was feeling rise and settle. And I said one sentence to myself: "Right now, my whole job is don't screw this up."

That was a growth moment, not a crisis. But the lesson carries into hard times too. Those are exactly the moments when people make their worst decisions, and leaders are people. Settle first. Then lead.

Build security out of small kept promises

So how do you give people security when you can't give them certainty about the future?

I use something I call the promise-keep loop. I promise something, then I do it. Promise, deliver. Promise, deliver. Over and over.

It sounds too small to matter. It isn't. I separate authority from trust. Authority is "this person knows what they're talking about." Trust is "this person cares about me, and I can believe what they say." In uncertain times, people don't need more of your authority. They need your trust.

The promises can be tiny. "I'll answer that question after the break," and then I do. "I want to cover two things," and then there are exactly two. It's become natural for me, but it's still something I keep in mind all the time.

For a manager, it could look like this. Instead of big statements about the future, make concrete promises about the next week or two. On Tuesday you'll have the new schedule. On Thursday we'll sit down and go over your projects. Then make sure those things actually happen. People today find it hard to believe what they're told, because so many promises turn out to be empty. The manager who proves that their word holds stands out, and people sense it long before they could explain why.

Answer the anxious question in a way that adds security

In uncertain periods, you'll get a lot of questions that sound like doubts. Underneath many of them is a simple need to feel safe.

I learned this in teaching. When someone asks, "Isn't this the same thing we covered two weeks ago?", I have two options. I can correct them: "No, it's different." Or I can say, "Yes, this builds right on what we covered then," and add the new piece after that.

The first answer crushes their sense of security. The second gives it back and still makes my point.

Here's why it matters so much. The people who need security are usually the biggest group in the room. My estimate is around two thirds. But they're the quietest, because asking a question takes a kind of confidence they don't have right then. So when you shut down the one person who did speak up, you shut down most of the room with them. Confirm what they got right. Keep it simple. Don't make it more complicated than it is.

Give people a step they can see

Here's something that changed how I read "low motivation." Very often, delay starts with uncertainty. A little doubt, a little worry about where to even start. And then people look around and grab whatever gives them the fastest sense of certainty. The easy email. The familiar task. Anything but the uncertain one.

And often it's not that they don't want it. They want it a lot. But fear is pulling back just as hard as the wanting is pushing forward, and the result feels like being stuck.

A vision gives people some certainty. But until they see real results on the ground, most people stay stuck. That's why in hard times I'd shrink the horizon. Give each person a next step they can see and finish. When people act and reality starts moving, even slowly, their belief in their own ability grows. That belief is what carries them through the next hard week.

Restore security without dropping the vision

Here's the balance I'm asking for. Some managers respond to a crisis by going quiet about the vision and talking only about survival. Others keep talking about the vision and ignore how scared people are. Neither works for long.

What works better is holding both. Keep saying what you're building and why it deserves to exist, because people still need meaning. And around it, build the security.

A few things help me do that:

• Go first. Be the one who acts first, both in how much you believe in the vision and in how strictly you keep your own standards.
• Keep the standards few and clear. Say them in simple language so everyone knows what still holds when a lot is changing.
• Don't let them slide. If one standard quietly falls, others tend to follow. And in a crisis, the standards are part of what makes people feel safe.
• Say no. It may be the most important word a leader has, and it's loaded with emotion for most people. In a shaky period, a clear no to the wrong things tells your team the ground under them still holds.

Bringing it to your managers

The meaning side of all this is the heart of a workshop I run for managers, Purpose-Driven Management.

My starting point is that nobody needs meaning manufactured for them. It's already there. In the workshop, managers learn to find what really drives each person, from the first interview or onboarding and through every weekly one-on-one, and to tie it to what the team is trying to achieve.

A big part of it is language. So many of the objections managers hear again and again aren't really about the decision. The delivery is what they're reacting to. That's even more true when people are anxious. The right words and tone can turn someone who's already looking for the exit into someone who wants to stay and build, with motivation that doesn't depend on a raise or a bonus.