I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, you think that those books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would get the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, go 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. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a 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 night day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now the moment 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 watch it made 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, we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, will take all these 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 remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine 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 get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner finished, they ask him to fill the hole back and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical of doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we took apart the one they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing you now, and we asked them to predict what result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? that condition, the correlation was zero — there was relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This a group within the software company that was put in different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to 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 later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They the CEO could have asked them to present to whole company about their journey over the last two years 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 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, like 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 be okay.” if you 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 about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that identical next to each other. That was the task. People did first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do for a little less money, the next sheet for little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, it 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, not look at it, did not scan it, and put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in 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 acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, 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 good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as 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 be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding 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, we might overdo it. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in the way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But 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 powder and they would put it in a box, they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do 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 a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But 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. much do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people did not build it, and just looked at it external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the 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 people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They it even less. Because in reality, it was even than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you met some kids. were just 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 pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, and of the time and connection. By the way, if you IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things way.
Let me say one last comment. If you about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. gave an 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 get one person to do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now 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 thinking about labor on way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality that we should probably add all kinds of things it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good is that if we added all of those components and thought them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.