I want to talk a little bit today labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And you think about mountain 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. It suggests that there’s all kinds other things that motivate us to work or behave all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking this after a student came to visit me. This was of my students from a few years earlier, and 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 PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a bank, and this was in preparation for a merger acquisition. And he was working very hard on this — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, 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 our labor. And to start with, we created a 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 this Bionicle three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point 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 put them under table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And can think about this as the essence of doing work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and 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 experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I 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 meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. 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 think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And would speculate that the 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 because enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there no relationship between the love of Legos, and how people built, which suggests to me that with this of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any that they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and said they felt like they had just been through experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised hand. I said, “How many of you now go earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have 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 with other parts of the organization. He could have them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how would work. But the thing is that any one of would require some effort and motivation. And I think CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people 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 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 a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on 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 plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So 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 stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — you get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The news is that ignoring the performance of people is as bad as 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, it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would it in a box, and they would ask housewives to pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was so that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t feel like your own. So what did they do? They the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and we gave a 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 them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing 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 as observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, I know 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 only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect larger. Why? Because now 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 uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells 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 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 not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when you about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most say not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t that other people don’t see things our way.
Let say one last comment. If you think about Adam versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about connection to what they are doing. And if you 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 in Industrial 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, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the and so on, all of a sudden Marx has things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation 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 is that we added all of those components and thought about — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.