I want to talk a little bit today about and work.
When we think about how people work, the intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing 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. suggests that there’s all kinds of 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 one of my students from few years earlier, and he came one day back 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 was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, gave them another one, and when they finished, we them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s 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 that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will 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 inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus punished by the gods to push the same rock a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the would roll over, and he would have to start again. And can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed rock on different hills, at least 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 is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when finished 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 endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front 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 big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I am describing you now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we 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 internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically any joy that they could get out of this activity. basically eliminated 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 put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do 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 present to the whole company their journey over the last two years and what they to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But thing is that any one of those would require effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically 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 moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort getting people to 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 of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people their name on 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, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the got 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 pay rate stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so 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 do and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I to show you is something about positive motivation. So is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store kind of okay furniture that 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 the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, would take this powder and they would put it a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. did not want them, and they thought about all of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody 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 your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it 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 to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which 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 as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the 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 of sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And 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, the way, just 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 so valuable, not because of who they are, but because of us, because they so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one 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 comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. gave an example of a pin 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 person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how 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 you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about on the way to work, and in the shower and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and 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 if we added all those components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.