I want to talk a little bit today about labor work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are 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, can direct them 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 people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read of people 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 having difficulty walking, and difficulty 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 sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came 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 working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. 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 them and we said, “Hey, would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something this cyclical version of doing something over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven the 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 cancer or 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 the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t people in this situation, we just described to them situation, much as I am describing to you now, we asked them to predict what the result would be. happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, extent to which it’s important.
There was one other of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things 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 this experiment, I went to talk to a big software in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they 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, and create the big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you show up to work later than you used to?” And everybody 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 to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but took me out to dinner and showed me what could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked to present to the whole company about their journey over the two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about aspect of their technology could fit with 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 some effort motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed in this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people to pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, 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, gave it the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile to them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked 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 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 what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so would do more 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 the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. 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 sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part 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 kind of furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much 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 more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured was that there was not enough effort involved. It was easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to the eggs and add them, you had to measure milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them 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 a frog a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to 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 we had two of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did 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 pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now could say — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and else will love it as well?” Which one of two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved origami 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, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? in 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 you looked at the instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And day you went to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most people 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 think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, one person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, the other hand, said that the alienation of labor incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that the Industrial Revolution, Adam 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 more important than meaning? I think answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they 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. when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and thought about them — how do we our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.