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