I want to talk little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that are like rats in a maze — that all people about is money, and the moment we give them money, can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, you think that those books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging 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 on beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to this 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 under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this 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 almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took the one that they just finished. And when they that, we 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 was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point that this was not big meaning. People were not curing or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably 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 data we 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 love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the who love Legos less would build less Legos because enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in 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 they were, but they were a company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put in different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product this company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took out to dinner and showed me what they could do with 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 CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect of technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if understood how important meaning is, then you would figure that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a little money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter look at it, scan it from 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 the of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In plot 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 way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — you get them not to be as happy with they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could done not so good work, because they realized people 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 in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So is a store in the 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 you, but every time I assemble one of those, takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when they cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the was not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? asked people to build some origami. We gave them on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or crane. But then 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 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 not build it, just looked at it as external observers. And what we was that the builders thought that these were beautiful of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were 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 love it well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody 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, gave the same task. For some people, we made harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this 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 something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if did not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would 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 of the 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, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said have 12 different steps, and if one person does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do step two and three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if 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 knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in knowledge economy? Is 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 about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added all those components and thought about 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 get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.