I want to talk a little bit today about labor work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them to another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He that for more than two weeks, he was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you 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 like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” 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, until at some people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison movies, sometimes the way that the 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 and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build 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 just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the that they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just the description of the experiment said that in the 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 extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And would speculate that the people who love Legos would 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 enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically any joy that they could get out of this activity. We eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a within the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the before I showed up, the CEO of this big company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. I 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 you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And they up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to to the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked to think about which aspect of their technology could 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 any of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the 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 the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, just put it on the side. In the third condition, experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate 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 page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was 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, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that 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. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than 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 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 — had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake 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 your own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, getting people to work harder, they actually got them love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them 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, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now could say — if you were a builder, do think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the more, they thought that everybody would see the world in view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In next 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 made harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now 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 about how we 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 of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if 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, and because of 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 way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which to tell you one more thing, which is, much our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, one person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one every 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 we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are they thinking about labor on way to 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 about motivation and payment the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those components and thought about — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.