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