If an employee is unproductive because they are unmotivated, they do have the self-empowerment to say “this project isn’t motivating for me, let’s reassign me/p

If an employee is unproductive because they are unmotivated, they do have the self-empowerment to say “this project isn’t motivating for me, let’s reassign me/plan for a more motivating project next/go over what the stakeholders need from this”. If they are lacking the skills required to succeed at the project, they can go for training/get more experience from completing a similar, smaller project. And if they are apathetic and feel like they can avoid redundancy by putting in the minimal effort, they can look for a new job. Sometimes the cause is external, like poor & changing requirements or wishful planning, or a bad personal relationship with coworkers, but even then the employee can feed that back to management. If they choose not to act on this feedback, see the ‘apathy’ option above. Source is self-management on solo projects.