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 money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is why give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of 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 behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I thinking about this after a student came to visit me. was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day to campus. And he told me the following story: He that for more than two weeks, he was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he actually quite happy. Every night he 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 do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would like to build 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 it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at 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 was inspired by David, student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock roll 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 rock on different hills, at least he would have sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they him to fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as were building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked them predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who just given the description of the experiment said that the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — was no relationship between the love of Legos, and much people built, which suggests to me that with manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was group within the software company that was put in different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. I described to them some of these Lego experiments, they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many you now go home earlier than you used to?” raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise hands, but they took me out to dinner and me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO 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 which of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see they would work. But the thing is that any of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did 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 I directed you in way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s important to spend some time, energy and effort in people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took 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 the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the 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 bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy 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, because realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more 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. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you whole way out there. The good news is that simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to you is something about positive motivation. So there is store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t about you, but every time I assemble one of those, takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA of furniture more 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 box, and 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 it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the and add them, you 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 like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do look at this 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 ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. then we 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 do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and were willing to pay five times more for them the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you say — if you were a builder, do you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I 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. if you did not have your kids. And one you went to the park 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 them now? Most people not that much. And this is because our kids are valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, 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 the way, these my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you 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 all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to step one, and one person to do step two and step three so 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 alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But you do one step every time, maybe you don’t 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. You can ask yourself, what in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor the way to work, and in the shower and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to 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 news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.