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