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