I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you 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 books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, moment they would 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.” But instead, go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that we care about the fight, about the challenge. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came 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. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a 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 the merger is canceled.” And the guy was depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. 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 start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” 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 so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them in the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called the condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly 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 for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them new one, and as they 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?” if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer building bridges. People were building 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 difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given 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 about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that people who love Legos would build more Legos, even less money, because after all, they get more internal from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation 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 of Legos, how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who were, but they were a big company in Seattle. was a group within the software company that was in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took me out to dinner and me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have them to think about which aspect of their technology fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance 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 you this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about 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. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could 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 middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole out there. The good news is that by simply looking at that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I 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 furniture takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, put things in the wrong way — I can’t say enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about mixes. So when they 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 pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was quite ugly — nothing like a frog or 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 sell it you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody 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 else would love it more as well.
In the version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the 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 at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations 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 have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, you 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. Which comes to tell one more thing, which is, much like our builders, they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about 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 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, is very low. But if you get one person do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the 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 are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if 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 reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? think the answer is no. I think that as we to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality that 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 about 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 people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.