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