Study title

To allow us empirically test whether harnessing meaning at work can improve outcomes in a blue-collar manufacturing firm, we collaborated with a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) to run a field experiment. The SME is a US owned electronic manufacturing service industry, who employees 39 people on their production floor. Although a small number of workers, we are able to gather outcome data on a daily basis. Full description is available https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15183/can-meaning-make-cents-making-the-meaning-of-work-salient-for-us-manufacturing-workers

We conducted a field experiment in a small electronics manufacturing firm in the US with the specific aim to improve minutes worked, punctuality, tardiness and safety checks. Our intervention was to put posters on the production floor on a random day, which made salient to the blue-collar employees the meaning and importance of their job, which comprised of routine repetitive tasks, in a before and after design. Overall, the intervention was a success with positive and significant effects consistently found for the outcomes both immediately after the experiment finished (+3 days) and also more than two weeks after (+15 days). Our study highlights it is possible to motivate blue collar manual workers intrinsically by drawing attention to the meaning of their work.