I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were trying to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of things that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student to visit me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some people 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 under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this as the of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the 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 to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now had another version of this experiment. In this other of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we described to them the situation, much as I am describing you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, extent to which it’s important.
There was one other of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate the people who love Legos would build more Legos, for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, how much people built, which 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 I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group the software company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And 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. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about journey over the last two years and what they decided do. He could 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 work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the of 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 it on the side. the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 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 have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost 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 their in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way 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 news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part 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 takes long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I things in the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s old story about cake mixes. So when they started mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that could serve 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 what did they do? They the eggs and the milk out of 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 was your cake. Now everything fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two of people: We had the people who built it, the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they willing to pay five times more for them than people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when looked at the easy origami, we saw the same — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if did not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How would you pay for them now? Most people say that much. And this is because our kids are valuable, not just 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 the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that 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 notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you one person to do step one, and one person to do two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if 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, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking labor on the way to work, and in the shower and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to to us. So when we think about labor, we usually about motivation and payment as the same thing, but reality is that we should probably add all kinds things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and thought about them — how do create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.