I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly 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 something like and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s about frostbite 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 a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care 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 for me personally, I started thinking this after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he came one 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 merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night 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.” And guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was 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 we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. they finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of 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. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You 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, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you 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 that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and us in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened 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 meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked them predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, after all, they get more internal joy from it. the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they 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 and the amount Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the 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 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 that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said felt like 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?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner 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. He could have asked to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. could have asked them to build some 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 CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning 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 okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out 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 slightly different. We a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of that were identical next to each other. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and 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 a shredder.
(Laughter)
What in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay 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 these efforts. In the shredder condition, it 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 way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see is really testing it, so you would do more and 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 in the middle? It turns out it was almost the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring you a whole way out there. The good news is by simply looking at something 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 news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time 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 of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in 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 had to measure the and add 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 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 asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what 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 think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love 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 everybody would see world in their view. They thought everybody else would 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, we the same task. For some people, we made it by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we 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 was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have kids. And one day you went to the park you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most people say not much. And 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, because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, like our builders, when they look at the creature 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 Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and one to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly in how people think about the connection to what they doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care the pin. But if you do one step every time, you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about 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 more things to to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality that we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that we added all of those components and thought about them — do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and do we do it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.