I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of 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 all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, you think that those books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, after they recover, they go up again. And if think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started about this after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. at the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos 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. when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until 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 put them the table. And we told them that at the of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he 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 work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this 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 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 them new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when they that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens 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. 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 was not a 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, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right 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 understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If 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 after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of and the amount of 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 this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished this experiment, I went to talk to a big company in Seattle. I can’t tell you 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 the next big product for this company. And the week I showed up, the CEO of this big software company 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. And described to them some of these Lego experiments, and said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show 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. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I them, I said, “What could the CEO have done make you not as depressed?” And they came up all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s 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 sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on pile of pages. So you take a piece, you put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front their eyes. Ignoring gets 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 quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly 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 want to show you is something about positive motivation. So is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those pieces of furniture more than I like other 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 would it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it the 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. the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had break the eggs and add them, you had to the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked it as external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and were willing to pay five times more for them than 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 love as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of 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 a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for now? Most people say not that much. And this because our kids are so valuable, not just because who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those 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, like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a 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 you get one person do step one, and one person to do step two and step three so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the is that we should probably add all kinds of 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 meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and the employees — I think we could get people to both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.