I want to talk a little bit today about labor 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 them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment would get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. 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, I started thinking this after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And told me the following story: He said that for than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before it due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply depressed. Now 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 PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave 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. And when they finished, took it, we put it under the table, and said, “Would you like to build another one, this time $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have start again. And you can think about this as the essence of futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what 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 want to build another one for $2.70?” if they said yes, we gave them 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, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in 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 predicted the direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So 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 data we looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get of 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 tell you who they were, but they were big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next product for this company. And the week before I up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of now show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but took me out to dinner and showed me what could do with expense 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 said CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company their journey over the last two years and what they decided do. He 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 require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We a sheet of paper with random letters, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical 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, the next sheet for a little less, and so on and so forth. And we had conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents 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. But should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you do more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that 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 news that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a 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 one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons 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 serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what did 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. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll 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 types people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So some people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the 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 than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations so on. Most people would say for a lot, 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 like 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 would pay for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not 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, if think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t things our way.
Let me say one last comment. you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, is a great example, and the reason for the Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step every time, maybe you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important meaning? I think the answer is no. I think as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are thinking about labor 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, usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.