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