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