I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of 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 think that books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they 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 down, and after they recover, they go up again. And you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working 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 presentation — 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 back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying 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 how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them 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 pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would like to 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?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they every one of them, we put them under the table. And we them that at the end of the experiment, we take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of something over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, gave them 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 one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them situation, much as I am describing to you now, we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one piece of data 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 the people who love would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people who Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to 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 software company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO done to make you not as depressed?” And they came with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years what they decided to do. He 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. the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people to pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” put it on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, 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 longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents sheet.
And this is 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 should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, you would do more and more and more. So 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 more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as 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, it and saying “Uh huh,” that 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 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 show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA a store 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 effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy 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 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 ask housewives to basically pour in, stir some water in it, mix it, put in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is 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 and milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do 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 it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. 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 just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of those two correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody else love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of you 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 at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because reality, it was even uglier than 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 for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly 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 few hours, and when you about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of time and connection. By the way, if you think instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those 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, which is, much our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production very low. But if you get one person to step one, and one person to do step two step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the 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 to what they are doing. And if you do 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own 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 on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if added all of those components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.