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