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