I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, naive intuition we have is that people are like in a maze — that all people care about is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are of moments of joy 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 just trying to be happy, the moment they would to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and 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 reaching end, a peak. It suggests that we care about fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds other things 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 a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He said that more than two weeks, he was working on a presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the 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 was perfecting this presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to with Legos. And for some people, we gave them 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 they with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build 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 for me.” This was what called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it for next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would 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 is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the 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 the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, knew that 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 another of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing you now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction 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 is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other 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 who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that 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 software in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company was put 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 I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And 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 you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but took me out to dinner and showed me what could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to to the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you 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 experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people find pairs of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. you take a piece, you just put it on side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the of paper, and put it 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. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at 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 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 it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would it in a box, and they would ask housewives basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the 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 bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we 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 paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of those is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, before you 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 because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, if you IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He 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 step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about 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 as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think as we move to situations in which people have to decide on 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 has things to say to us. So when we think labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create our 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.