I want to talk a little bit today labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive we have is that people are like rats in a — that all people care about is money, and the we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get the top, they would say, “This was a terrible 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, go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests kinds 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 that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few 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 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 boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now 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 presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we 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 under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them 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 not worth it for me.” This what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they every one of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to the same rock up a hill, and when he got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would 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 hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of something over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. 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 apart one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them 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 probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who love less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a 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 that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have 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 last two years and what they decided do. He could have asked them to think about aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that any of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not understand 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 be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, you would figure out that it’s actually important 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, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical next 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, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, put it directly 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 mean that worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You people’s efforts, output — 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 have not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news 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. The good is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next I want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out 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 not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was 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 to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet paper. And these were all novices, and they built that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll it to you. How much do you want to for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those 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 else love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked 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.
(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 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 sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most people say that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, if think 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. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, 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 Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person 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, this is a great example, and reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think 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, maybe don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we all of those components and thought about them — how do we our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.