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