I want to talk little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why 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 same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or behave in kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came visit me. This was one of my students from a years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. to start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one after another. After they finished every one of them, put them under the table. And we told them that at end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, and 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 remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can about 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 sense of progress. Also, if look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is get them to dig a hole, and 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 that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was big meaning. People were 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 was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of experiment. In this other version of the 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 to predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who just given the description of the experiment said that the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate the people who love Legos would build more Legos, for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of 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 suggests to me that with manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And 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 been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about 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 other parts the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not the 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 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, energy and effort in getting people to more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper random letters, and we asked people to find pairs letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did write 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 pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the condition, it 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 be as happy 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 not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into 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 out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply 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 doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is 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 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 those pieces. I can’t 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 mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. it was your 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 to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave 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 frog or crane. But then 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. much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do you [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 it as well?” one of those two is correct? Turns out the not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because reality, it was even uglier than the first 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 your kids for?” Your and associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not your kids. And one day you went to the and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you 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 this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, because are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful 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 things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care the 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 correct 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? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people have 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 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 all kinds things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added of those components and thought about them — how do create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we it in our workplace, and for the employees — think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.