I want to talk a little bit today about labor 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 moment we give money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it all kinds 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 there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work behave in all kinds 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 years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. at the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with 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 to build Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this 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 it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, gave them another one, and when they 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 one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when almost 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 futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave 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 one that they built and we broke. So 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 in the condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And 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. the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation 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 this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I running this experiment, I went to talk to a software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, they asked them to innovate, and create the next 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 of 200 of the most depressed 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 asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they me out to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about journey over the last two years and what they decided do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, see how they would work. But the thing is any one of those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like 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 you in this way, everything will okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet paper with random letters, and we asked people to pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. was the task. People did the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, then you see nobody is really testing it, so would do more and more and more. So in fact, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and 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 was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding 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 has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know you, but every time I assemble one of those, it me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I things in the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake in the ’40s, they would take this powder and would put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So 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 the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little 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 do we look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions how to create origami, and we gave them a of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, the people who did not build it, and just at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five 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 will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave the task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the of 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 in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, 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 and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because 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 that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful 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 things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and one to do step two and step three and so on, 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 the alienation of is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the is no. I think that as we move to situations which people have to decide on their own about much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the to work, and in the shower and so on, of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So 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 of things it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is if we added all of those components and thought them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.