Ask HN: How do you motivate teammates that aren't as involved?

To give more background, I became the manager of a team that historically was heavily underserviced. Regardless, we're whipping it into shape now, but our client engineers (ios/android) are losing motivation as a lot of our problems are primarily backend.

I am starting to consider that maybe the composition of the team is incorrect. I want to give them more interesting projects, but there are really not that many, and the ones that exist involve a lot of digging into and uncovering issues that currently exist.

Ofc the argument to be made here is that they're paid to do a job, but at the end of the day I want them to feel like they're a part of a mission/team and while we do have objectives and we track them, they seem to be pretty unmotivated with the broader problems we have at hand (they're not super interesting to anybody outside of backend).

I was considering letting them leave standup early once we start talking about backend work, and same for sprint plannings. Or maybe just re-shuffling the team a bit. I'm not sure, would appreciate some advice