I want to talk little 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, the moment we give them money, we can direct them work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers 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 mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests kinds of things. It suggests that we care about 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 kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came visit me. This was one of my students from a years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he me the following story: He said that for more two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want 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 what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them in the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that 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 guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the 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 the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to build another one for $2.70?” And if said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning a 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 as am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and some who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the 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. We basically eliminated it.
Soon I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This a group within the software company that was put in a different building, they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you show up to work later than you used to?” everybody 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, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as 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 last two years and what they decided to do. He have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could with other parts of the organization. He could have them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed you in way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” if you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, 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 do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what 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 per sheet.
And this is basically the result we before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be 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 is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next I want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say I those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder they would put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not 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, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had break the eggs and add them, you had to the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And were all novices, and they built something that was really ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much you want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you say — if you were 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 will it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? out the builders not only loved the origami more, thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I 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 was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They were like your kids, and you played with them for a hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just 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 just because of 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 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 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 that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example a pin factory. He said pins 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, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was correct than Karl Marx. But 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 efficiency still more important meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are 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 about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those components and thought them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.