I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, naive intuition we have is that people are like in a maze — that all people care about is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we direct 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 all kinds of strange behaviors the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do 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 you think about mountain climbing as an example, it all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. suggests that we care 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 of ways.
And me personally, I started thinking about this after a student to visit me. This was one of my students a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And told me the following story: He said that for than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard 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 said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they 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, time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished one of them, we put them under the table. we told them that at the end of the experiment, we take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, when he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing 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 the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in second 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 were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment 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 importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed 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 you who 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 to innovate, and the next big product for this company. And the week before I up, the 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 people I’ve ever talked to. I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of now show up to work later than you used to?” everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have to make you not as depressed?” And they came up all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to about which 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 importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important spend some time, energy and effort in getting people care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and put it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In shredder condition, it 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 to be as happy with what they’re doing. But should point out, by the way, that in the condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder 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 out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and 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 has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is 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 I want to show you is about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know you, but every time I assemble one of those, it me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the wrong — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives basically pour it in, stir some water in it, 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, taste was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs 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 think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how create 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 told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want pay 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, and the people who did build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and else will love it as well?” Which one of two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do 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. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you at the hard instructions, the 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 than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would 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 if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They were like your kids, and you played with them for a hours, and when you were about to leave, the said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step 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 Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say us. So when we think about labor, we usually about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added of those components and thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.