I want to talk a little bit today about labor work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we is that people are like rats in a maze — that people care about is money, and the moment we give money, we can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like and mountain climbing. If you read books of people climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of students from a few years earlier, and he came day back to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he 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 experiment this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when they finished, we took it, we put it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. we told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember 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 roll over, and he would have to start again. And you think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to the 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 what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we them the one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should out that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we described to them the situation, much as I am to you now, and we asked them to predict the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who 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 Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to that with this manipulation of breaking things in front people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to 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 was put in a different building, and they asked to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And week before I showed 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 of the most people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later than used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and they decided to do. He could have asked them think about which aspect of their technology could fit other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. 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 understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and in getting people to care more 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 to each other. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on 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 put it on the pile to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look 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 that people worked harder. worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in 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 first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the 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 and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem 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 in terms of negative motivation, eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask housewives basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that was not 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, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and 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, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing to pay for it. And we had types 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 we was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which of 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 everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. in reality, it 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 so on. Most people say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you 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 pay for now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, about the instructions that come with kids, those are tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to step one, and one person to do step two and step and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation 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 you do one step time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the is that we should probably add all kinds of things to — 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 our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people be both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.