Meaning at Work

Abstract

Firms traditionally use incentives to align their goals with the workers’. In this paper, we evaluate a firm’s attempt to do the opposite: encouraging employees to realize their own goals and ask whether those can be met at work. They do so by means of a day-long workshop to “discover your purpose”, a reflection process of pivotal life experiences, which we randomize among 3000 employees in 14 countries. We track outcomes over the subsequent two years and find that the workshop leads to an increase in worker performance, driven by the bottom tail either leaving or becoming more productive. Worker pay also increases by 4 percent. The results, which are stable over two years, indicate that the workshop doubles the probability of worker exits and increases the probability of lateral transfers by 18 percent. We also find evidence of a trade-off between meaning and pay in the control group which disappears among the treated, who are also less likely to list “work-life” balance as a leading concern. These point towards the potential mechanism: a greater understanding of personal meaning via a coherent narrative of one’s past memories and present work, which can permanently decrease the cost of effort.