I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think 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 full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they 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 you think about mountain climbing an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following 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 a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation his 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 quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he 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 we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to with, we created a little experiment in which we people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them 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. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical of doing something over and over and over that seems to be 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 one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece data we looked at. If you think about it, are some people who love Legos, and some people don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed joy that they could get out of this activity. We 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, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How of you now show up to work later 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 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 CEO have done to you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said CEO could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what they decided do. He could have asked them to think about which of their technology could fit with other parts of organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed 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 would figure 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 was slightly different. We a sheet of paper with random letters, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more and more. So in fact, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if don’t think about it carefully, we 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 about motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a time to 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 more confusing, I put things in the way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s old story about cake mixes. So when they started mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But turns out they 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 figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now had to break the eggs and add them, you to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing 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 a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell to you. How much do you want to pay it?” And we measured how much they were willing pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it 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 times more them than the people who just evaluated them externally. 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 else will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns the builders not only loved the origami more, they 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. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw 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 it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if 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 about to leave, parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because they so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which to tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t 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 if one person all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, one person to do step two and step three and so on, can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and reason 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 to what they are doing. And if you do 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that we added all of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.