I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — that people care about 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 to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think something 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 if were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, after they recover, they go up again. And if think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all of things. It suggests that we care about reaching 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 to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of my from a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed at night every day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how we experiment with this idea of the fruits of labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this 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 it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People one Bionicle after another. After they 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, will put them back in the boxes, and we use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock roll over, and he would have to start again. 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 of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about 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 exactly what we did. We people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if 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 were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the that they built and we broke. So this was an cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the 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 direction not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand magnitude of the 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 who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy it. And the people who love Legos less would less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? that condition, the correlation was zero — there was relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. can’t tell you who they were, but they were big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and 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, and canceled the project. And I stood in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of 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 hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over the two years and what they decided to do. He could asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that one of those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like 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 that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend time, energy and effort in getting people to care more 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 letters that identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then asked if they wanted to do another for a little money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their 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, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the condition, people did not 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. 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 those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is 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 point out, by the way, that in 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 see nobody is really testing it, so you would do and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition 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 news is that ignoring the performance of people is as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically people’s motivations. So the 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 don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s old story 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 ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look 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 paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You 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 they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the not only loved the origami more, they thought that would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else love it more as well.
In the next version, we to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave 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, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it 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 say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but 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 come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you 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 if one person all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do two and step three and so on, production can tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection 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 Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a Marx has more things to say to us. So we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and as the same thing, but the reality is that should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good is that if we added all of those components thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.