I want to talk a little today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive we have is that people are like rats in a — 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 why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, 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 that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this a student came to visit me. This was one of my students a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with 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 you dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do 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 me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one them, we put them under the table. And we told them 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 for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus 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 would have start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version 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 people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then asked 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. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of experiment. In 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 to you now, and asked them to predict what the 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 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 we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they from it 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 Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and 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 could get out this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. was a group within the software company that was in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And 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 said they felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of now show up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked to think about which aspect of their technology could with other parts of the organization. He could have them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And 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, 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 was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did 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 their name on the sheet, found all the pairs 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 not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you put it on the side. In the third condition, 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 mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — you get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people 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 more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like 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 bad is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you whole way out there. The good news is that by simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’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 they 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 out was that there was not enough effort involved. It so easy that nobody could serve cake to their and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now had to break the eggs and add them, you to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this 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 of people: had the people 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 were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For 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. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators 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 extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played them for a few hours, and when you were to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for 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 because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one thing, which is, much like our builders, when they at the creature of their creation, we don’t see other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, 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 every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the is no. I think that as we move to situations which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we all of those components and thought about them — how do we create own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.