I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct to work one way, we can direct them to work way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. if people were just trying to be happy, the moment would get to the top, they would say, “This a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about 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. he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we them to build with Legos. And for some people, gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and 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 not 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 under the table. And we told them that at the end of experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the 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 to end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of experiment, that’s exactly what 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 for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us in front of 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 the way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People were just given the description of the experiment said that in the 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 which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, create the next big product for this company. And the week I 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 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 just been through 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?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took 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 to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. the thing is that any one of those would require some effort 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 unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you how 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 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 identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on 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 them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did scan 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 of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way 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 had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what the ignored condition? Would 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 bad news here. bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in 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 more effortful, it’s more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it 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, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve to their 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 like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to the eggs and add them, you had to measure milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything 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 higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who 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 to pay five times more for them than the people who evaluated them 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 those is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would the world in their view. They thought everybody else would it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you 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 this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have kids. And one day you went to the park 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, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are 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 that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do step two and three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and 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. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think 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, and the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added all those components and thought about them — how do we create our meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — think we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.