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