AKA, how to crush the life (and love) out of your employees.
I saw a TED Talk recently that got straight to the heart of one of the greatest frustrations we marketing professionals face every day: the pointless destruction of perfectly good work.
In “What makes us feel good about our work?,” Dan Ariely discusses the impacts that money, recognition, meaning, and people’s intrinsic love for the work have on motivation and productivity.
First you build them up . . .
In the first of two experiments, Dan and his team asked test subjects to build with Legos. “Would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars.”
When the test subjects had built their first Bionicle, the experimenter took it and put it under the table.
“Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?”
If they agreed, the experimenter gave them another Bionicle to build.
Each time the test subjects finished building a Bionicle, they were asked if they would like to build another for slightly less money. Eventually, the test subjects stopped building Bionicles because the rewards were no longer worth the effort.
. . . and then you tear them down
Next, Dan and his team asked a second group to build Bionicles. But this time, after the test subjects had built their first Bionicle and received a second, the experimenter disassembled the first Bionicle before their very eyes.
Each time the test subjects built a new Bionicle, they saw it destroyed as they worked on the next.
Dan and his team called this the Sisyphus group, named for the conniving king who was punished by the gods to push an immense boulder up a hill again and again, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom of the hill every time he nearly reached the top.
And what did they find?
Meaningful work makes workers more productive
As you can guess, Group 1 built many more Bionicles than Group 2. Despite the fact that the Sisyphus group was paid just as much money for their work, these poor souls built an average of just 7 Bionicles compared to the first group’s 11.
But things got even more interesting when the researchers considered another key factor: intrinsic love for the work.
What’s love got to do with it?
Dan and his team suspected that people who liked Legos would build more Bionicles, even for less money, because they derived more internal joy from the work. And that people who liked Legos less would build fewer Bionicles.
This is precisely what the researchers found with the subjects in Group 1. “There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built,” Dan said.
But the Sisyphic group was a different story. Dan explains:
“In that condition, the correlation was zero—there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.”
Does this sound familiar? If you write or design marketing communications for a living, I’ll bet it does.
Cranky Case File
I frequently experienced this type of Sisyphistic skullduggery with a big-name client whose Legal department was certifiably insane. It got to the point that my agency’s account managers were running so scared, they started to proactively neuter the writing themselves at the first hint that I had done anything new or different from the status quo.
As a result, the headlines on my pieces got weaker. Leads lost their punch. Paragraphs that had packed substance and emotional power were sapped of their strength.
Very quickly, I began to view working for this client as a waste of time and effort. If every compelling thing that I put into the work was going to be taken out, then what reason did I have to do the work? If the end result was doomed to become some toothless and hackneyed message that prospects could easily ignore, then what was the point?
I eventually left over this. Well, it wasn’t the only reason. But the continuous destruction of my work was huge because the writing was no longer effective and it was no longer mine.
Experiment two: The value of acknowledgment
Dan and his team also sought to understand the impact that having their work acknowledged had on people’s motivation.
For this experiment, the researchers took a sheet of paper with random letters and asked test subjects to find pairs of identical letters adjacent to each other.
As in the Lego experiment, the test subjects were asked if they wanted to complete another sheet for a little less money, the next sheet for a little less than before, and so on.
The researchers divided test subjects into three groups:
- Group 1, the “Acknowledged” group. Test subjects wrote their names on the paper. When they handed over their work, the experimenter looked at it, said “Uh-huh,” and placed it on a pile.
- Group 2, the “Ignored” group. Test subjects did not write their names on the paper. The experimenter simply took each completed page and set it on the pile without looking at it.
- Group 3, the “Shredder” group. In this group, the experimenter took each completed sheet and put it directly into a paper shredder.
Unsurprisingly, the people in the Acknowledged group worked much harder and longer than the people in the Shredder group. What may surprise you is that the people in the Ignored group performed nearly as poorly as those in the Shredder group.
People whose work was acknowledged (far left bar) continued to work longer and for less money than those whose work was ignored or worse, shredded.
As Dan says in the video (boldface is mine):
“This is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output—you get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing.”
“Now, there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes . . . The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying ‘Uh-huh,’ that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy.”
Amen to that.
I myself am a big believer in the power of recognition. In fact, I strongly suspect that a lack of meaningful acknowledgment is at the heart of many of today’s problems—not just in the workplace, but also at school and at home. If some teachers and parents would take just a little more time to look at what their kids are doing and give them a metaphorical “uh-huh,” I think some of those kids might care a little more and work a bit harder to do better.
But I digress. There is more to the video, and I highly recommend you watch it. In particular, there is a fun segment about cake mixes and IKEA furniture, and a thought-provoking discussion of our society’s evolution to a new knowledge economy where efficiency may no longer be more important than meaning, ownership, pride, and caring about the work.
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