Purpose at Work Translates into Performance
When employees are encouraged to pursue their interests and values, both they and their employers benefit.
- By
- March 03, 2026
- CBR - Management
Traditionally, when organizations want to motivate people to work, they offer incentives—such as salaries, benefits and paid time off—in hopes of aligning employees’ behavior with the organization’s goals. Recently, a different philosophy has started to take hold. Some employers are now encouraging employees to center their own interests and values, betting that personal fulfillment will ultimately drive stronger performance at work.
This individual-focused approach has merit, according to research from the London School of Economics’ Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera and Chicago Booth’s Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales. They find that overall performance tends to improve when workers are encouraged to reflect on their life purpose and understand whether and how it can be connected to their job. This intervention is effective, the findings suggest, because it makes work more enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding for employees. “It is the opposite of what we’ve always done,” says Minni. “It’s bottom-up instead of top-down.”
The researchers partnered with a large, multinational, consumer-goods company that since 2017 has offered a “Discover Your Purpose” workshop to many of its employees. Designed and implemented by the company, it is offered during normal working hours, facilitated by employees (anyone who has completed the workshop and a training is eligible to be a facilitator), and focused on helping employees identify their purpose and link it to their work and personal lives.
The program has two parts: First, workers spend two weeks completing a self-guided packet that asks them to reflect on the activities they enjoyed when they were young, their interests outside of work, one challenge they have faced, and a period in their life and career when they were successful. Then they join a daylong, in-person workshop with 4–5 colleagues in which they discuss their reflections, with the goal of helping each participant find a common theme in their life.
The theme becomes the basis for a short personal statement about purpose. For example, an administrative assistant who loves structure and dislikes inefficiency and chaos might state their purpose as: “To bring clarity to complex problems so that others can act with confidence.” The hope is that the assistant might then create or find more meaning in work, perhaps by developing filing systems or crafting actionable points out of unstructured discussions.
To assess whether the workshop produced such successes, the researchers ran a randomized trial involving nearly 3,000 of the consumer-goods company’s employees between January 2019 and December 2021. They evaluated the workshop’s effects on exits, performance, pay, and well-being over the subsequent two years using surveys and administrative data, including from annual performance evaluations.
Leaving to find meaning
At a large multinational company, the researchers find that an invitation to and participation in a “Discover Your Purpose” workshop increased the likelihood of quitting, consistent with workers reassessing job fit.
The intervention led to an overall improvement in performance, the study indicates. Low-performing participants tended to either improve at their existing role or leave the company. The researchers estimate that the intervention produced an internal rate of return of about 4 percent over one year and about 70 percent over two years, a result that was buoyed by the fact that the workshop was relatively inexpensive to offer.
And the workshop had effects beyond performance improvements, seemingly changing what participants wanted from their jobs. On surveys that asked about employees’ priorities, men in the control group (who did not participate in the workshop) ranked prestige higher than women did, whereas women in the control group ranked flexibility higher. But these gender differences were smaller among employees who experienced the intervention, and men who attended the workshop were more likely to take parental leave than men who did not.
For all participants, the workshop seemed to change their emphasis on work-life balance. In surveys, they rated work-life balance as a lower priority than employees who didn’t participate in the program. The prompts and discussions led them to stop viewing work and life as “two distinct competing spheres” but instead as more intertwined and complementary, says Minni.
Two factors were critical to the intervention’s success, she says. For one, the idea that employees should live their purpose was authentically embedded in the operations and culture of the company, which had been offering the workshop for more than two years before the study took place. Its leaders already considered meaning a legitimate reason to change roles or pursue new job activities, the researchers write. As for the other, the company was transparent about the workshop’s goals. It vowed not to use or abuse any information revealed or to take advantage of the performance improvements of employees who stayed—by, for instance, cutting pay or bonuses. “These types of interventions can go the opposite way if employees start feeling like manipulated widgets,” says Minni.
But the findings suggest that even companies with a different corporate culture could reap benefits by exploring nontraditional strategies for motivating employees. “With monetary incentives, it’s like putting a coin in the machine,” says Minni. “We can do better than that. Treat your employees as human beings rather than machines, and that can go a long way.”
Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni, and Luigi Zingales, “Meaning at Work,” Working paper, May 2025.
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