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