I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my from a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, 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 do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. to start with, we created a little experiment in we gave people Legos, and we asked them to with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, 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 you to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we 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 next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock roll over, and he would have to start again. And can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other 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 right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy it. And the people who love Legos less would build less because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no between the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company 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 asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody their 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 showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present the whole company about their journey over the last two 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 have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that any one those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if understood how important meaning is, then you would figure that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy effort in getting 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 find pairs of that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did scan it, and simply put 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 showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 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 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 so work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see 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, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring you a whole way out there. The good news that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in 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 you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much 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 enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this and they would put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about 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 that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel 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 was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a of 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 really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and looked at it as external observers. And what we found that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the people 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 nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA 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 instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little of how you fold origami. For some people, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at 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 even than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one you went to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for few hours, and 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 pay them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because are so connected to us, and because of the and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at creature of their creation, we don’t see that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an 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 one person to do step one, and one person to step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality 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 we move to situations in which people have to decide on own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a Marx has more things to say to us. So we think about labor, we usually think about motivation payment as the same thing, but the reality is that should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and thought about them — do we create 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 productive and happier.
Thank you very much.