I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, can direct them 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 this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are 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 moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a 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. It suggests that we about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more 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 day. And the day before it was due, he sent PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and 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 want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it me.” This 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 we told them at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, will put them back in the boxes, and we will 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 when he almost got to end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to again. And you can think about this as the essence doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they 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 that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that 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 depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and said they felt like they had just been through 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 you now go home earlier than you used to?” raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO done to make you not as depressed?” And they up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole company about journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect of their could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have them to 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 the CEO did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. he would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing in this way, everything will be okay.” But if understood how important meaning is, then you would figure that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet paper with random letters, and we asked people to find of letters that were identical next to each other. was the task. People did the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it the experimenter, the experimenter 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 did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — 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 so work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see is really testing it, so you would do more more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets a whole way out there. The good news is by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad 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 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 know you, but 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 enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take powder and they would put it in a box, 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 of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was 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 the store. It 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 and add them, you to 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 IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And were all novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then 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 want to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and looked at it as external observers. And what we was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces 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 you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” one of those two is correct? Turns out the not only loved the origami more, they thought that would see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? 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 you sell kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. people would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have kids. And one day you went to the park and you met kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How would you pay for them now? Most people say not much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, because are so connected to us, and because of the time 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 more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He pins have 12 different steps, and 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 three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step every time, maybe you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith 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 economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the is no. I think that as we move to in which people have to decide on their own how much 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 sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think motivation and payment as the same thing, but the 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 added all those components and thought about them — how do create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we it in our workplace, and for the employees — think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.