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