With the coming release of My Colony 2 v0.10.0, your colonists will finally have to get off of their lazy behinds and get a job. Structures now have worker requirements, and their productive output is based on their current staffing level. If they have no workers at all, the building will simply stop operating, similar to MC1.
New to MC2 though, is a new indicator icon that will appear over a structure if it does not have any workers:
This icon will let you quickly see which structures need workers.