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