I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people 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 to work another way. This is why give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are 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 terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit a beach somewhere 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. suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It 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 this after 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 was working on PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build 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.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, 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, asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we them under the table. And we told them that at end of 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 the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the would 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 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 guards torture prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something 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. We asked people, “Would you to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened was that built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another 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 the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, 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. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — was no relationship between the love of Legos, and much people built, which suggests to me that with this of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but 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 next big product for this company. And the week before showed up, the CEO of this big software company to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. said, “How many of you now go home earlier than used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over last two years and what they decided to do. He could asked them to think about which aspect of their could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the 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 would figure out that it’s actually important to spend time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We a sheet of paper with random letters, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their 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 it the pile next to them. In the second condition, did not 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 the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have not so good work, because they realized people were shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do and more 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 what the ignored condition? Would 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 almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. gets you a whole way out there. The good news that by 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 adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we overdo it. So this is all in terms of motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I to show you is something about positive motivation. So is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is 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, takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would it in 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 were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all of 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. was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, we gave them a sheet of paper. And these 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 for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of you fold origami. For 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 the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it 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 you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think 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. if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a hours, and when you were about to leave, the said, “Hey, by the way, just 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 because our kids are so valuable, not just because of they are, but because of us, because they are connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important meaning? I think the answer is no. I think as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about on the way to work, and in the shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality that we should probably add all kinds of things 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 more productive and happier.
Thank you much.