I want to talk a little today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct to work another way. This is why we give to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read of people who climb 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 difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. if people were just trying to be happy, the moment would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And me personally, I started thinking about this after a came to visit me. This was one of my from a few years earlier, and he came one day to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits our labor. And to start with, we created a experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we them to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we 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 it 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 we told that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and 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, at least he would some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get 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 about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what 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 another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if said yes, we gave them the one that they and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, extent to which it’s important.
There was one other of data we looked at. If you think about it, there some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. the people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the 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, basically crushed any joy that they could get out this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t you who they were, but they were a big in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that 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 stood there in front of 200 of the most people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later than used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to to the whole company about their journey over the last years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about aspect of their technology could fit with other parts the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically 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 in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do for 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 on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take 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 happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean 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 per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You 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 the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets 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 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, eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA 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 a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like 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 had to measure the milk and it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: had the people who built it, and the people who not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they willing to pay five times more for them than the who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but know that nobody else would love 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, we tried 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, had little diagrams 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 was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
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But imagine this slightly 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, and you played them for a few hours, and when you were to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most people say not that much. And is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, like our builders, when they look at the creature their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. 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 you get one person to do step one, and person to do step two 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 is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. 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 the is no. I think that as we move to in which people have to decide on their own how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, for the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.