I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market 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 that those books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a somewhere 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 suggests all kinds things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit 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: He said for more than two weeks, he was working on a presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to this Bionicle for three 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 it under the 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 you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, 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 he would have some sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what did. We asked people, “Would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when they that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So was an endless cycle of them building, and us in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The 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. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to 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 you speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, after all, they get more internal joy from it. And people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually 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 condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, create the next big product for this company. And week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many you now show up to work later than you used to?” And everybody their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier you used 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 to and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO done to make you not as depressed?” And they came with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how would work. But the thing is that any one those would require some effort and motivation. And I think CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment directed you in 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 figure out it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for little less money, the next sheet for a little less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did look at it, did not scan it, and simply it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the 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 for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first you’d do good work, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and 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 it was almost like shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is 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 to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long 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 say I those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old 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 in it, mix it, it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. they figured out was that there was not enough involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to 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 like own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We them instructions on how to create origami, and we them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we two 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 what found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love as well?” Which one of those two is correct? out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at easy 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 uglier than first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. 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 and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents 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 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 the time connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are and so on. Which comes to tell you one thing, which is, much like our builders, when they at the creature of their creation, we don’t see other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He an example of a 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 do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor incredibly important in how people think about the connection what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about pin. But if you do one step every time, you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good is that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.