I want to talk a little today about labor and work.
When we think about people work, the naive intuition we have is that are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the 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 mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds other things that motivate us to work or behave all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one of students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He that for more than two weeks, he was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before 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. Now the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $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 some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this 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 what we did. We asked people, “Would you to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said 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 a new one, as they were building it, we took apart the that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing 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 were building for a few cents. And not only that, everybody that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we them to predict what the result would be. What happened? predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People were just 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 magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests me that with this manipulation of breaking things in of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t you who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a 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 before 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 the most depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How of you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many 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 to your reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they 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 with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy effort in 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 of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted do another for a little less money, the next for a little bit less, and so on and forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that 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 shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not be as happy with 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 good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The news 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 that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the was not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something was really quite 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 you want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now could say — if you were a builder, do think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of those is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world their view. They thought everybody else 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 people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the 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, it was even than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay them now? Most people say not that much. And is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if get one person to do step one, and one person do step two and step 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, that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in people 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 as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith more correct than 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 efficiency more important 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 labor the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all a sudden Marx has more things 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 of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those components and thought about — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and the employees — I think we could get people be both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.