I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we 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 all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just to 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, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my 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 two weeks, 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. stayed late at night every 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 canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If said 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, until some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, put them under the table. And we told them 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 use it 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 gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted 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. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the 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 this manipulation of 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 they were, but they were a company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create next big product for this company. And the week I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they 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. I said, “How many of now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took out to dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them think about which aspect of their technology could fit with parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. he would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and now I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to some time, energy and effort in getting people to care about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter the sheet of paper, and put it directly into 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 worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the condition, it was 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 should point out, by the way, that in the condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe first sheet 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 could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a way out there. The good news is that by looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to you is something about positive motivation. So there is a in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was 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, you to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like IKEA 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 to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, they built something that was really quite ugly — like a frog or a crane. But then we them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who not build it, and just looked at it as observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we little diagrams of how you fold origami. For 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 easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier 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?” Your memories and associations and on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day went to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if 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 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 come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one to do step two and step three and so on, production can tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation labor is 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. But if you do one every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more 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 than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the to work, and in the shower and so on, all of sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those components thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and for the — I think we could get people to be both productive and happier.
Thank you very much.