While this is absolutely true effective supervision and competent management make a world of difference with this issue.

Lazy staff continue to exist because they are typically inadequately supervised. As a result the extent of their behavior is not clear to management. So that needs to be corrected. But if that’s corrected (it could be) management needs to respond to the problematic behavior with appropriate consequences (eg constructive feedback, warnings, corrective action, firing) to shape the behavior going forward.

There’s a lot more to it; a huge part that is often overlooked is that management should also be providing ongoing consequences in a positive sense to entice the desired behaviors. Fear of punishment isn’t really a great consequence for operant conditioning. So we look at some other options: how do we create motivation to make people want to do their job tasks? How do we build morale? How do we build enthusiasm? This can be as simple as “if you get [x] done consistently you get [special privilege]”. Corrective and punitive action should be a last resort for when these systems are failing, even if you’re adjusting them to try and make them work

This is a cultural problem in the us (and many other places) though. We have this view of “I gave you a job and I’m already paying you so you should be so fucking grateful to me”. We love the hierarchy model. The idea of management and ownership taking care of workers is something that’s laughable or, at best, paid a pittance (here’s a small bonus, keep working a lot). It’s only very recently that companies have started giving a shit about industrial and organizational psychology/organization behavioral management/etc and even when they do it’s usually lip service to buy street cred

But ultimately it’s managements job to create an environment that makes employees want to work. The frustrating part though is that this isn’t really a problem to most management because the financial impacts are hard to measure. They’re definitely there and sometimes they’re more directly measurable, stuff like increased turnover as you burn through staff, but more often than not it’s stuff that’s far more subtle and difficult to measure like decreased utilization and productivity.