I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that are like rats in a maze — that all care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them to another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those 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 moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was 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 start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, will put them back 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 called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven the 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. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now had another version of this experiment. In this other of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in the condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people 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 people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. the people who love Legos less would build less because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation breaking 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 I finished running this experiment, 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 within the software company that was put in a different building, they asked them to innovate, and create the next product for this company. And the week before I 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 of the most people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many you now go home earlier than you used to?” raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they me out to dinner and showed me what they could with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO 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 two years and what they decided to do. He have asked them to think about which aspect of technology could fit with other parts of the organization. could 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 did not the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” if you understood how important meaning is, then you figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, we asked people to find pairs of letters that identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet 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 numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 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. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could done not so good work, because they realized people were just it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then see nobody is really testing it, so you would do and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets a whole way out there. The good news is that by looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know you, but every time I assemble one of those, it me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the 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 in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it a box, and they would ask 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 very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What 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, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. 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. Now it was cake. Now everything 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 look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How 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 it, and the people who did not build it, just looked at it as external observers. And what found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, thought that everybody would see the world in their view. thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do 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 the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now 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 lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
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But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played them for a few hours, and when you were to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, 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 and three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, you don’t care 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 the knowledge economy. 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 in which people have to decide on their own about much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add kinds 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 own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.