I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them to work way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger acquisition. And he was working very hard on this — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build Legos. And for 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 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, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end of experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story 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 start again. And you can think about this as the essence of 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 that guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you to build 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 new one, as they were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” if they said yes, we gave them the one that built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we point out that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now had another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the direction but not 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 one other piece data we looked 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 who Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a within the software company that was put in a building, and they asked them to innovate, and create next big product for this company. And the week I showed up, the CEO of this big software went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said 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?” everybody 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 took me out dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over 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. He could asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing that any 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 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 if you understood how important meaning is, you would figure out that it’s actually important to some time, energy and effort in getting people to more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. was the task. People did the first 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. In the first condition, people their name 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 not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay 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 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, output — you get them not to be happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have not so good work, because they realized people were shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I 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 say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, it, put it 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 was not effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the 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 bit like IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do look at this question experimentally? We asked people to some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog 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 to you. How much do you want to pay it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love 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 the not only loved the origami more, they thought that would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They all 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 asked you, “How much you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for now? Most people 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 so to us, and because of the time and connection. 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 to tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t that other people don’t see things our way.
Let say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and one person to step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re the 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 as we 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 on way to 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 all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and thought about them — do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and do we do it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.