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