I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about 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 we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At 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 books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit 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 all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking this after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me following story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about this as essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way the guards torture the prisoners is to get them dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s about 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 what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this was endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we point out that this was not big meaning. People were not 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 another version of this experiment. In this 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 asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some people love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you 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 would less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was very nice correlation between the love of Legos and amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, create the next big product for this company. And week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just 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 of you now go home earlier than you used to?” 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, they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, said, “What could the CEO have done to make you as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to to the whole company about their journey over the two years and what they decided to do. He could asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, see how they would work. But the thing is that any one 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. And he say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting 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 were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter 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 a piece, you just put it on the side. In third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing 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 the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not be as happy with what they’re doing. But I point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or 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 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 simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we overdo it. So this is all in terms of motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one 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 more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to a degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you to pay for it?” And we measured how much they willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: had the people who built it, and the people did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay 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 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 two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it harder hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders 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 you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to 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 before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? people say not that much. And this is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, 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 Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. 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 reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection to what they are doing. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step 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 now we’re in the knowledge economy. can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still 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 own about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we probably add all kinds of things to 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, how do we do it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to be both productive and happier.
Thank you very much.