I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to one way, we can direct them to work another way. is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If 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 difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. if people were just trying to be happy, the they would get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and came one day back to campus. And he told the following 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 and acquisition. And he was working hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late night every day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” they said yes, we 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, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them in the boxes, and we will use it for next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, he would have to start again. And you can think this 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 at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about this cyclical version of doing something over and and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle three 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 building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? 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 point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked them predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. who were just given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude the importance, the extent 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 who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because enjoyment that they derive from it 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 the 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 that with this of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. can’t tell you who they were, but they 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 company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I 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 they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show to work later than you used to?” And everybody their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody 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 with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would some 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 of is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the 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 not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did look at it, did not scan it, and simply put on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these 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 — get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see is really testing it, so you would do more and more more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news 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 there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news 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 about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy process. But when I finish it, I seem to those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir 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 all kinds reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and 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. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet paper. And 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 to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, 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 evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all 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 evaluate things.
Now about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have kids. And one day you went to the park you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of they are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, like our builders, when 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 Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins 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 to do step two step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more than meaning? I think the answer 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 to it, are they about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and 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 news is that if we added all of components and thought about them — how do 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 you much.