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