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