I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have 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 mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And you 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 the challenge. It suggests that there’s kinds of other things that motivate us to work behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I thinking about this 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. And he told me following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his 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 the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it the 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 you remember story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and would have to start again. And you can think about this as the of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole up and then dig again. There’s something about this version of doing something over and over and over seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second 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 asked 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 took apart the that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction not the right magnitude. People who were just given description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the who love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I 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 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 described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?” everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And 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 asked them to to the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked them think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the of 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 this way, everything will okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to another for a little less money, the next sheet a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and 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 not look it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to as happy with what they’re doing. But I should out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. 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, people could have submitted more work and gotten money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, 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 performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it 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 so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I the process. But when I finish it, I seem to those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake in the ’40s, they would take this 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 kinds reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody 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 out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people work harder, they actually got them 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 sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much you want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and the people who 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 to pay five more 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 this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders 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 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 had little diagrams of how you origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most say not that much. And this is because our kids are valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if 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 three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which have 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 a sudden 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 we should probably add kinds of 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 create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people be both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.