I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s about frostbite and having difficulty 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 a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. And you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was working on PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. 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 is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his 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 with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle 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, and we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another 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 people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, least he would have some sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second 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 want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the description the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some who don’t. And you would speculate that the people love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from 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 in the Sisyphic 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 crushed 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. 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 to innovate, and create the big product for this company. And the week before showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many you now show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I 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, but they me out to dinner and showed me what they do 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 all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have them to think about which aspect 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 thing is that any one of those would require some effort motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of is 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.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to 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 the condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not 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, the got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or in the middle? It turns out it was almost like shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be 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 show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t 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 I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces 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 in box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, taste was 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 in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked to 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 quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people 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 were beautiful pieces 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 you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the 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 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 easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met some kids. were just like your kids, and you played with them for few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, 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 who they are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, about the instructions that come with kids, those are tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t things our way.
Let me say one last comment. you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if get one person to do step one, and one to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how 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. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as move to situations in which people have to decide their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how they feel to it, are they thinking about labor the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden has more things to say to us. So when we about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.