Why We Work

Barry Schwartz

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781471141812
• eBook ISBN: 9781471141829
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the TED series: Why We WorkWhy do we work? The question seems so simple. But Professor Barry Schwartz proves that the answer is surprising, complex and urgent. We've long been taught that the reason we work is primarily for a paycheck. In fact, we've shaped much of the infrastructure of our society to accommodate this belief. Then why are so many people dissatisfied with their work, despite healthy compensation? And why do so many people find immense fulfillment and satisfaction through "menial" jobs? Schwartz reveals exactly how the false idea that the goal for work should be pay came to be, how we came to believe that paying workers more leads to better work, and why this has made our society confused, unhappy and has established a dangerously misguided system. Ultimately, Schwartz proves that the root of what drives us to good work can rarely be incentivized, and that the cause of bad work is often an attempt to do just that. With great insight and wisdom, Schwartz illuminates the path for readers to take their first steps toward understanding, empowering us all to find great work. Schwartz is also the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, which has been translated into twenty languages. He can be seen discussing his ideas in his TEDTalks The Paradox of Choiceand Using Our Practical Wisdom.

1

The False Rationale

For more than two centuries, we have absorbed, as a society and as individuals, some false ideas about our relationship to work. It is a long-accepted tenet of economics, buttressed by some theories from psychology, that if you want to get someone—an employee, a student, a government official, your own child—to do something, you have to make it worth his or her while. People do things for incentives, for rewards, for money. You can see this view operating in the “carrot and stick” approach that has dominated efforts to solve the world’s recent financial crisis. To prevent a financial meltdown from happening again, people argued, we needed to replace the “dumb” incentives that led to it with “smarter” ones. We had to get incentives right. Nothing else really mattered. This idea animated the inventor of the free market, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, he wrote that:

It is in the inherent interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner that authority will permit.

In other words, people work for pay—nothing more and nothing less. Smith’s belief in the power of incentives led him to argue for organizing work by dividing labor into simple, easily repeated, essentially meaningless units. As long as people were getting paid for what they did, it didn’t matter very much what their jobs entailed. And by dividing labor into little bits, society would gain enormous productive efficiency. In extolling the virtues of the division of labor, Smith offered a description of a pin factory that has become famous:

One man draws out the wire, another straits it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head . . . I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed. . . . They could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day. . . . But if they had all wrought separately and independently . . . they certainly could not, each of them, make twenty.

As we will see later, Smith’s view of human beings was far more subtle, complex, and nuanced than what is captured in the quotes above. He did not believe that “man at work” told the full story, or even the most important story, about human nature. But in the hands of Smith’s descendants, much of the nuance and subtlety was lost. More than a century later, Smith’s views about work guided the father of what came to be called the “scientific management” movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor used meticulous time and motion studies to refine the factory, as envisioned by Smith, so that human laborers were part of a well-oiled machine. And he designed compensation schemes that pushed employees to work hard, work fast, and work accurately. Not long after that, Smith’s view was echoed in the thinking of the major figure in the psychology of the mid-twentieth century, B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s studies of rats and pigeons engaged in simple, repetitive tasks, over and over again, for rewards of food or water, provided the mantle of scientific rigor and a theoretical rationale for the workplace innovations developed by Taylor. Skinner showed that the behavior of animals could be powerfully influenced and precisely controlled by manipulating the amount and frequency of the rewards the behavior produced. Just as Taylor found that piecework (a fixed payment for each task completed) produced high performance in the factory, Skinner found that the pigeon equivalent of piecework produced high performance in the laboratory.

You might ask why anyone would choose to work in Smith’s pin factory, putting heads on pins, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. Smith’s answer was that, of course, people wouldn’t enjoy working in the pin factory. But they wouldn’t enjoy working anywhere. What Smith was telling us is that the only reason people do any kind of work is for the payoffs it produces. And as long as it produces adequate payoffs, what the work itself consists of doesn’t matter.

Adam Smith was mistaken about our attitudes and aspirations regarding work. But as capitalism developed in his shadow, under the sway of the “incentive theory of everything,” a mode of work evolved in which all the other satisfactions that might come from it were neglected or eliminated. And so it came to be that all over the planet, people trudged off to work each day with little expectation of meaning, engagement, or challenge. Because there was no reason to work except for the paycheck, they worked for the paycheck. So it came to be that Smith’s mistaken idea about why people work became true.

I don’t mean to suggest here that work was bliss prior to the industrial revolution. By no means. But the work of farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, hard though it may have been, offered people a fair amount of discretion, autonomy, and variety in what they did each day. It gave them a chance to use their ingenuity to solve problems as they arose and to develop more effective ways to get their work done. All that opportunity was left behind when people walked through the factory doors.

Making False Ideas True

You might agree with Smith. You might believe that for most people, by their very natures, work is about pay and nothing more. Only the “elite” want challenge, meaning, and engagement, and can expect it from their work. Aside from being more than a little arrogant, this view is incorrect. Many people who do what we think of as mundane jobs—janitors, factory workers, call-center employees—care about more than the wage. And plenty of professionals work just for the money. What people come to seek in work largely depends on what their work makes available. And the conditions of human labor created by the industrial revolution, and perpetuated thanks in part to theories from the social sciences, have systematically deprived people of fulfillment from their work. In doing so, they have deprived people of an important source of satisfaction—and produced inferior workers in the bargain.

The lesson here is that just how important material incentives are to people will depend on how the human workplace is structured. And if we structure it in keeping with the false idea that people work only for pay, we’ll create workplaces that make this false idea true. Thus, it’s not true that “you just can’t get good help anymore.” It is true that you just can’t get good help anymore when you only give people work to do that is deadening and soulless. What it takes to “get good help” is jobs that people want to do. And we’ll see that this aspiration for good work is not “pie-in-the-sky” idealism. It is well within our grasp.

It should be said that over the years, management theory and practice have gone through periods in which the diverse motives people bring to the workplace have been acknowledged—even celebrated—and managers have been encouraged to structure the work lives of their employees so that engagement and meaning in work are possible, both for the good of the employee and for the good of the organization. Douglas McGregor’s “Theory Y” was an especially influential effort along these lines a half century ago, and Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda published an important article documenting how such ideas about management have waxed and waned over the years. But somehow, ideas like these have never stuck. The unorthodox, attention-grabbing practices of Google and other high-flying Silicon Valley companies may give the impression that assembly-line drudgery is a thing of the past. But like gravitational force, the notion that people work only for pay has repeatedly brought loftier hopes about what is possible in the workplace back down to earth. Over the centuries, Adam Smith’s ideas about human nature have proven extremely resilient indeed.

Ideas or theories about human nature have a unique place in the sciences. We don’t have to worry that the cosmos will be changed by our theories about the cosmos. The planets really don’t care what we think or how we theorize about them. But we do have to worry that human nature will be changed by our theories of human nature. Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that human beings are “unfinished animals.” What he meant is that it is human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society that surrounds us. That human nature is more created than discovered. We “design” human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design.

If we want to help design a human nature that seeks and finds challenge, engagement, meaning, and satisfaction from work, we have to start building our way out of a deep hole that almost three centuries of misconceptions about human motivation and human nature have put us in, and help foster workplaces in which challenge, engagement, meaning, and satisfaction are possible.

2

When Work Is Good

Confronted with evidence that so few people in the world get satisfaction from their work, we need to ask why. Two ready explanations come to mind. First, many of us believe that only certain kinds of jobs permit people to find meaning, engagement, discretion, and autonomy, and opportunities to learn and grow. If we take this view, good work is just going to be the province of the few—lawyers, doctors, bankers, teachers, software developers, company CEOs, and so on. For everyone else, work will be about the paycheck. It’s just the way things are. Us and them.

Alternatively, we might take the view that pretty much every job has the potential to offer people satisfying work. What stands in the way is the incredible efficiency associated with routinized, assembly-line type work. Assembly-line work can be done by people with low skill and little training, and it is responsible for the explosive economic growth we have witnessed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Unsatisfying work is just the price people pay for a society in which affordable cars, cable TV, cell phones, and computers are the norm. Adam Smith certainly articulated this view when he talked about the growth of productivity that accompanied the division of labor in the pin factory.

So either satisfying work is not for everybody, or unsatisfying work is the price we pay for material prosperity, or both. Both of these answers to the “why” question are plausible. But both of these answers are wrong.

Cleaning Hospitals

Luke works as a custodian in a major teaching hospital. In an interview with researcher Amy Wrzesniewski and her collaborators, who were studying how people structure their work, Luke reported an incident in which he cleaned a comatose young patient’s room—twice. He had already done it once, but the patient’s father, who had been keeping a vigil for months, hadn’t seen Luke clean the room and had snapped at him. So Luke cleaned it again. Graciously. Why? Luke explained it like this:

Luke: I kind of knew the situation about his son. His son had been here for a long time and . . . from what I hear, his son had got into a fight and he was paralyzed. That’s why he got there, and he was in a coma and he wasn’t coming out of the coma. . . Well . . . I went and cleaned his room. His father would stay here every day, all day, but he smoked cigarettes. So, he had went out to smoke a cigarette and after I cleaned the room, he came back up to the room. I ran into him in the hall, and he just freaked out . . . telling me I didn’t do it. I didn’t clean the room and all this stuff. And at first, I got on the defensive, and I was going to argue with him. But I don’t know. Something caught me and I said, “I’m sorry. I’ll go clean the room.”

Interviewer: And you cleaned it again?

Luke: Yeah, I cleaned it so that he could see me clean it . . . I can understand how he could be. It was like six months that his son was here. He’d be a little frustrated, and so I cleaned it again. But I wasn’t angry with him. I guess I could understand.

Nothing about this interaction is built into Luke’s work as a custodian. Look at his job description:

– Operate carpet shampooing and upholstery cleaning equipment

– Operate mechanical cleaning and scrubbing equipment

– Strip and wax floor surfaces

– Maintain entrance area by performing such duties as sweeping, salting, and shoveling

– Clean grounds and area by performing such duties as picking up paper or trash

– Unplug commodes, urinals, and sink drains without dismantling the fixture

– Wet mop floors and stairways

– Collect and dispose of soiled linen

– Operate vacuum cleaning equipment

– Clean and wax furniture, cases, fixtures, and furnishings

– Clean mirrors, interior side of exterior glass, and both sides of interior glass

– Clean toilet rooms and fixtures

– Stock restroom supplies

– Dust venetian blinds while standing on floor or stool

– Clean patient bedside equipment

– Make beds and change linen

– Collect and transport waste materials to central location

– Wet mop small areas of floor or stairs to clean up such items as spilled liquid or food

– Replace burned-out incandescent lightbulbs

– Move and arrange furniture and furnishings

– Collect and transport soiled linen to central location

Luke’s job description says nothing about responsibility or care for patients and their families. He has a long list of duties, but not a single item on the list even mentions interacting with another human being. From this description, Luke could be working in a shoe factory or a mortuary instead of a hospital.

If Luke were doing the job laid out by the job description, it would have been reasonable for him simply to have explained to the patient’s father that he’d already cleaned the room, and perhaps to have brought in a supervisor to mediate if the father remained angry. Luke might have ignored the man and just gone about his business. He might have gotten angry himself.

But Luke was doing a different job than his official description would suggest. That’s what Wrzesniewski and her colleagues found when they conducted in-depth interviews with Luke and other hospital custodians. The researchers had asked the custodians to talk about their jobs, and the custodians began to tell them stories about what they did. Luke’s stories told them that his “official” duties were only one part of his real job, and that another central part of his job was to make the patients and their families feel comfortable, to cheer them up when they were down, to encourage them and divert them from their pain and their fear, and to give them a willing ear if they felt like talking. Luke wanted to do something more than mere custodial work.

What Luke sought in his work was shaped by the aims—what Aristotle would call the telos—of his organization. The telos of the hospital—promoting health, curing illness, relieving suffering—was embedded in Luke’s approach to his job. The amazing thing Wrzesniewski and her colleagues discovered about Luke and many of his coworkers was that they understood and internalized these aims in spite of their official job description, not because of it. The job they were actually doing was one they had shaped for themselves in light of the telos of medical care. Ben, another custodian, told the researchers how he stopped mopping the hallway floor because a patient who was recovering from major surgery was out of his bed getting a little much-needed exercise by walking slowly up and down the hall. Corey told them about how he ignored his supervisor’s admonitions and refrained from vacuuming the visitors’ lounge while some family members, who were there all day, every day, happened to be napping. These custodians shaped their jobs with the central purpose of the hospital in mind.

Job crafting is what Wrzesniewski and her colleagues called it. Luke, Ben, and Corey were not generic custodians; they were hospital custodians. They saw themselves as playing an important role in an institution whose aim is to see to the care and welfare of patients. So, when Luke was confronted by the angry father and he had to decide what to do, he could not look the answer up in his official job description because the rules that defined his job said nothing about situations like this. What guided him was the aim of the job he had crafted.

What is it that enabled Luke to do work like this? First, Luke’s job gave him broad discretion when it came to social interactions with the patients. He didn’t have a supervisor looking over his shoulder every minute. Further, the challenge of getting these social inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Epigraph page
• INTRODUCTION The Crucial Question
• CHAPTER 1 The False Rationale
• CHAPTER 2 When Work Is Good
• CHAPTER 3 How Good Work Goes Bad
• CHAPTER 4 The Technology of Ideas
• CHAPTER 5 The Future of Work
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• WORKS CITED AND FURTHER READING
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• WATCH BARRY SCHWARTZ’S TED TALK
• ALSO FROM TED BOOKS
• ABOUT TED