I want to talk little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people are rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people 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 if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, 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 they recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or behave all 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 years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he me the following story: He said that for more two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He working in a big bank, and this was in preparation a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch 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 asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time $2.70?” If they 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, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put under the 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 the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and 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 sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get 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 over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if said yes, we gave them the one that they built we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just 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 of the importance, the extent to 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 more Legos, for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they from it is lower. And that’s actually what we 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, correlation was zero — there was no relationship between love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was 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 that group, 200 engineers, and the project. And I stood there in front of 200 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 had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they me out to dinner and showed me what they could with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last years and what they decided to do. He could asked them to think about which aspect of their technology fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. the thing is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I 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 out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and it on 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 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 people worked harder. They worked for longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we 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 done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating motivation.
The next part I want to show you is about positive 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 more 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 like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit 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 build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And were all novices, and they built something that was quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want 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 it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more them than the people who just evaluated them externally. you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, thought that everybody would see the world in their view. thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it 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 much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you some kids. They were just like your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so 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 think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an 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, one person to do step two and step three so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly 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 Industrial Revolution, Adam 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 happens in knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, in the shower and 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 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 — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.