I want to talk a little today about labor and work.
When we think about people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct to work another way. This is why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what 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, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were trying to be happy, the moment they would get 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 again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it all kinds of things. It suggests that we care reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student 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, this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And was working very hard on this presentation — 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 him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, asked them, “Do you want to 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.” was what we called the meaningful condition. People built Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will 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 you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the 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 of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to 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 one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in 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 Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as am describing to you now, and we asked them predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t the magnitude of 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 people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, after all, they get more internal joy from it. the people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between 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 of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically any joy that they could get out 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 were big company in Seattle. This was a group within the company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed I’ve ever talked to. And I described 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 up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They the CEO could have asked them to present to 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 parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they work. But the thing is that any one of those would some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you how important meaning is, then you would figure out it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter 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 put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for 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 condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do work, but then you 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 more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding 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 carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show you is something about positive motivation. So there is store in 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 about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
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And there’s old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour in, stir some water in it, mix it, put in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But turns out they were very unpopular. People did not them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to a degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people built it, and the people who did not build it, just looked at it as external observers. And what we found that the builders thought that these 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 think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only the origami more, they thought that everybody would see world in their view. They thought everybody else would it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it difficult. So for some 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. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we at the easy origami, we saw the same 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 extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. people would say for a lot, a lot of money.
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On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to park and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by way, just before 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 so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. 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 step three so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this a great example, and the reason for the Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation labor 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 the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I the answer is no. I think that as we move to in 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 way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden 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 kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.