I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think 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 to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about the end, a peak. It suggests that we care 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 students from 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 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 the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to 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 you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we them under the table. And we told them that at end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at he would have some sense of progress. Also, if look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless of 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 built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in situation, we just described to them the situation, much as am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict the result would be. What happened? People predicted the direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably one more 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 one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would speculate that the people who love Legos build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And the people who love less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work later you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go 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 all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to to the 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 other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see they would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [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, everything will be okay.” But if you how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually to spend some time, energy and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter look at it, scan it from top 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 at it, did not scan it, and simply put it the pile of pages. So you take a piece, just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to as happy with what they’re doing. But I should out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have 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, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about 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 shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way there. The good news is that by simply looking at that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this 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 in 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, every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out 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, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel your 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 milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked it as external observers. And what we found was the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the who 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 that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love 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 in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried make it more difficult. So for some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the 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 first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went 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 to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would pay for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really 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. If you about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But you get one person to do step one, and one person do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection what they are doing. And if you do 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 reality is we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the thing, but the reality is that we should probably all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.