I want to talk a little bit today about labor work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, 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, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that 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 me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came visit me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at every 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, but merger is canceled.” And 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 it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do 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. People one Bionicle 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 all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this version of doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, 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 building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing you now, and we asked them to predict what result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just the description of the experiment said that in the condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people don’t. And you would speculate that the people who Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between love 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 crushed any joy that they get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company that put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise hands, but they took 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 you 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 what they decided to do. He have asked them to think about which aspect of technology could fit with other parts of the organization. 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 effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if understood how important 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 took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet 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 it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the 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 more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The news is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it 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 seems to incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of motivation, or 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 of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things 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 pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very 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, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what 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. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit 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 question experimentally? asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on to create origami, and we gave them a sheet 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 really belongs to us. worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one 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 else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little of how you fold origami. For some people, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at easy origami, we saw 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 this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, when 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 you for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are valuable, not just because of who they are, but because us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and one person do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that 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 you one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in 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 we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of 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, the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to — 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, and how do we it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.