I want to talk a little bit today about labor work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we is that people are like rats in a maze — that people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like 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 misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were trying to be happy, the moment they would get the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you 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 kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my students from few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you 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, until some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, will put them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he got to the end, the rock would roll over, he would have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing futile 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 the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a hole, and 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 particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if said yes, we gave them 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 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 destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even 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 would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy it. And 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 a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they 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, but were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to 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 add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make you not depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They the CEO could have asked them to present to the company 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 fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, see how they would work. But the thing is that one of those would require some effort and motivation. And think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, 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, everything be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would 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 different. We took 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 asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on pile next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, the sheet of paper, did not look at it, not scan it, and simply put it on the of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people 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 condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more 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 more the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere the middle? It turns out it was almost like shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you whole way out there. The good news is that by looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, if we don’t think about it carefully, we might it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the 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 and they would put it in a box, and they would housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here 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 did they do? took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had break the eggs and add them, you had to the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. 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 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 sell it you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And measured how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it harder by the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it less. Because in reality, it was even 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 your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few 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 much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because us, because they are so connected to us, and of the time and connection. By the 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 are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they at the creature of their creation, we don’t see other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person 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 increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step 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, and now we’re in 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 think that as we move to situations which people have to 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 to to us. So when we think 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 is that if we added all those components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and do we do it in our workplace, and for the — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.