I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people about is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, mountains, do you think that those books are full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a came to visit me. This was one of my from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we them under the table. And we told them that at the of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they him to fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So was an endless cycle of them building, and us in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I running this experiment, I went to talk to a big company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company that put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I there in front of 200 of the most depressed I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised hand. I said, “How many of you now go home than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have not so good work, because they realized people were just it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, then you see nobody is really testing it, so you do more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a way out there. The good news is that by simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take powder and they would put it in a box, they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out of powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs add them, you had to measure the milk and it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing a higher degree.
So how do we look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that was really ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at it as observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of those is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day went to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, they are so connected to us, and because of the time connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But you get one person to do step one, and person to do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection to what they are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added all those components and thought about them — how do we create own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.