I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think 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. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he came day back to campus. And he told me the story: He said that for more than two weeks, he working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger acquisition. And he was working very hard on this — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until 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 them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, was punished by the gods to push the same rock a hill, and 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 essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner finished, they ask him to fill the hole back and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven 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 Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked 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 importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. was a very nice correlation between the love of and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to them some of 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 show up to work later you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked to 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 thing that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of 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.” if you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. could have done not so good work, because they realized were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The news is that ignoring the performance of people is as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to you is something about positive motivation. So there is store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay that takes a 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 more confusing, I put things in wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and would put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People not want them, and they thought about all kinds of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they got them to love what they’re doing to a degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people did not build 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 to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the instructions, the effect 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 even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one you went to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at creature of their creation, we don’t see that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion 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 person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people about the connection to what they are doing. And you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more 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 answer is no. I think that we move to situations in which people have to decide on own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are thinking about labor on 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, but the is that we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added 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, for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.