I want talk 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 — that people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, 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 breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and 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. And the 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.” And the was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put under the table. And we told them that at end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, he would have to start again. And you can think about this as essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he the rock on different hills, at least he would have sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them 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 cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems 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 for three 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 new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when compare these two conditions? The first thing that 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. were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made 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 them the situation, as I am describing to you now, and we them to predict 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 more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There one other piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would 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 it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show to work later than 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 not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make not as depressed?” And they came up with all of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company their journey over the last two years and what 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 next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed you this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, not 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, experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, because realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first 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 shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored 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 good and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a way out there. The good news is that by simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I things in the wrong way — I can’t say enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, would take this powder and they 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 — — you had cake. But it turns out they were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that could serve cake to 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 feel your own. So what did they do? They took eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had types of people: We had the people who built it, the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as observers. And what we found was that the builders thought these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for 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 that nobody 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 the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the in their view. They thought everybody else would love it as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you some kids. They were just like your kids, and you with them for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay 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 to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is low. But if you get one person to do one, and one person to do step two and step and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people 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 much.
I think that 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 happens in a economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I the answer is no. I think that as we to situations in which people have to decide on their about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the 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 is that we added all of those components and thought about — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.