I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the intuition we have is that people are like rats in maze — that all people care about is money, and the we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This why 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 labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests kinds of things. It suggests that we care about the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things 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 few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was 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 the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply 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 him quite depressed.
So I thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we them to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build 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, we took it, put it under the table, and we said, “Would like to build another 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 one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will it for the next participant.
There was another condition. other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the 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 think about this as the essence doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is 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 about this cyclical version doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly 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 one, and as they were building it, we took apart the that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” if they said yes, we gave them the one they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should out that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small 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 I am describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent 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 some people don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there 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, we basically crushed any joy that they could get of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who were, but they were a big company in Seattle. was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week before showed up, the CEO of this big software company to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many you now show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole company about their over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts the organization. He could 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 the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. you take a piece, you just put it on side. In the third 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 way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You people’s efforts, output — you get them not to as happy with what they’re doing. But I should out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet 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, the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. bad news is that ignoring the performance of people 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 at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about 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 to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say I those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So 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, stir water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns they were 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 was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out of powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and gave them a sheet of paper. And these were novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this really belongs to us. You worked for 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 they were to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, just looked at it as external observers. And what we found that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. you could say — if you were a builder, do you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved origami more, they thought 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 the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you 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 so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if did not have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and when were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, before 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 is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful so on. Which comes to 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 people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He 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 you get person to do step one, and one person to step two and step three and so on, production can tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they 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 say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and do we do it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.