I want to talk a little bit today labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the intuition we have is that people are like rats a maze — that all people care about is money, and moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of 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 world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if were just 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 me sit a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, after they recover, they go up again. And if you about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of students from a few years earlier, and he came day back to campus. And he told me the story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He late at night every day. And 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 was late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. to start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under 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, asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, put them under the table. And we told them at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, we will use it for the next participant.
There 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, Sisyphus was punished by 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 can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about cyclical version of doing something 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 people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, we took the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should point out that this was not big meaning. People not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that 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 this situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some people love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of 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 who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company was put in a different building, and they asked them innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described them some of these Lego experiments, and they said felt like they had just been 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 go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came with 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 have asked them to think about which aspect of technology could fit with other parts of the organization. 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 CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” 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 slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical to each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another a little less money, the next sheet for a bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the 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 side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you do 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 shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of 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,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we 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 something about positive motivation. So there is a store the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes 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. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this and they would put it in a box, and would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their 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 the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like 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 at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions how to create origami, and we gave them a of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much you want to pay for it?” And we 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 who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now could say — if you were a builder, do you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. some 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 when looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — 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. Because in reality, it even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
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 with them for a hours, and when you were about to leave, the 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? Most say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not because of who they are, but because of us, because they are connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that 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, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you one person to do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think the connection to what they are doing. And if you do 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I the answer is no. I think that as we move situations in which people have to decide on their about 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 a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think motivation and payment as the same thing, but the is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — 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 our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.