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 — that all 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 bankers and pay all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market 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 books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. was one of my students from a few years 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 big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would like to 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, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the 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 next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have start again. And you can think about this as the essence doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when 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 the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were it, we took apart the one that they just finished. when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. So was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The thing that happened was that people built many more — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a opportunity for 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 just described them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece data we looked at. If you think about it, there some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because 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 actually what we found in the condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but were a big company in Seattle. This was a group the software company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised hand. I said, “How many of you now go home than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And 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 the CEO have done to you 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 over the last years and what 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 build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of would require some effort and motivation. And I think the basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. he would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People 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 on and so forth. And we had conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put it the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 per sheet.
And this is basically the result we before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see is really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort front 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 it 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 to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems 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 a in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put in the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would this 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, put it the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs the milk out 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 bit like IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll it to you. How much do you want to pay it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now could say — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, gave the same task. For some people, we made it by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked 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 imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the park you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them for few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because who they are, but because of us, because they are connected to us, and because of the time and connection. the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the is no. I 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 in the and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and 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 is that if we added all of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.