I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we is that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to 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 of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was of my students from a few years earlier, and he one 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 big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, we will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on 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 a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, gave them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, 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 when you compare these two conditions? The first thing happened was that people built many more Bionicles — in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. even 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 described to 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 right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would speculate 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 Legos because enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — was no relationship between the love of Legos, and much people built, which suggests to me that with manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who were, but they were a big company in Seattle. was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work later you used to?” And everybody 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 things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO have asked them to present to the whole company about journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. could have 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 motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the of meaning 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 understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend time, energy and 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 asked people find pairs of 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 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 letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the of pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that 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 condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could done not so good work, because they realized people just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into 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 out it was like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and 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. did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. they figured out was that there was not enough involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and them, you had to measure 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 people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet 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 to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, 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 to pay five times more for them the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would the world in their view. They thought everybody else love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because 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 so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They were just your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much you pay for them now? Most people say not much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because they so connected to us, and because of the time connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when look 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 very important notion efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and 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 two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is important in how people think about the connection to what are 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 think in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that we move to situations in which people have to decide on 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 and so on, all of a sudden Marx has things to say to us. So when we think about labor, usually think about motivation 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 good news is that if added all of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.