I want to talk a little bit today about labor work.
When we think about how people work, the naive we have is that people are like rats in maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, 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 books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, would say, “This was a 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 go up again. And you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking this after a student came to visit me. This one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard 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 is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want 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.” This was what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. you can think about this as the essence of doing work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if 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 front of their eyes.
Now what when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was not 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 the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you about it, there are some people who love Legos, and people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people who Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a within the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And week before I showed 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 depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to them some of Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. I asked them, I said, “How many of you show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many you now add not-so-kosher things to your 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, said, “What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last years and what they decided to do. He could have them to think about which aspect of their technology fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But thing is that any one of those would require effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs 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 a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, just put it on the side. In the third condition, experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into 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 people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — you get them not to be as happy with they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring 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 that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news 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 this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And 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 those, it 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 those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I to like 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 in a box, and they would housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in 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 to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll it 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 built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only 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 version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We to make it more difficult. So for some people, gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than 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?” Your and associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, because of us, because they are so connected to us, 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, of course, are and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like 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 one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But you get one person to do step one, and one person do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think 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 a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer no. I think that as we move to situations in people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden has more things to say to us. So when think about labor, we usually think about motivation and as 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 good news that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.