You can't motivate individuals with generic programs. To maximize motivation ask each employee what turns them on. Learn to recognize and eliminate threats. Employees often feel that their managers use threats to try to motivate them, yet managers routinely deny it. So managers need to learn to recognize the things that employees see as threats and work on eliminating or reframing them.
Opportunity is an effective motivator.
Fear is not. Stop Distracting Employees. Most employees want nothing more than to focus on doing their jobs better and better. But from their perspective, critical incidents distract them, leading to worries about communication, security, fairness, respect and other key job criteria that managers rarely recognize. If you first take care of employees' most fundamental intangible requirements, you can shift the focus from their concerns to your motivation and performance agenda.