Meaning at Work
Abstract
Firms traditionally use incentives to align their goals with the workers’. In thispaper, 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 coun-
tries. We track outcomes over the subsequent two years and find that the work-
shop 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 mech-
anism: 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.