I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in 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. is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, 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, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, after they recover, they go up again. And if think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests kinds of things. It suggests that we care about the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student to visit me. This was one of 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 was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired David, my student. And this other condition we called the condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back 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 did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart one 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 them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing happened was that people built many more Bionicles — in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we 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 quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked to predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to 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 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 get more internal joy it. And the people who love Legos less would build less because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between love of Legos, and how much people built, which to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed 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, they were a big company in Seattle. This was a within the software company that was put in a different building, they asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show 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 many of you add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me what could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with parts of the organization. He could have asked them to some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important 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 paper with random letters, and we asked people to find of letters that were identical next to each other. That 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 had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, it from top to 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, not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could done not so good work, because they realized people just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was 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 a way out there. The good news is that by simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to incredibly 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 show is something about positive motivation. So there is a in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a 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, put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. 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 the ’40s, they would take this powder they would put it in a box, and they would housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody 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 add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, getting people to work harder, they actually got them love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how 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, origami really belongs 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 measured much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and looked at it as external observers. And what we found was the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces 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 you were a builder, 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 else love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world their view. They thought everybody else would love it as well.
In the next version, we tried to do IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when you about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay them now? Most people say not that much. And is because our kids are so valuable, not just 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 think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one 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 Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor 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 you do 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. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we to situations in which people have to decide on their own how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should 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 thought about them — how do we create our meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think we get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.