The Best Places to Work Have a Purpose

Why organisational purpose matters to employee experience, and how a shared sense of direction helps create better workplaces, stronger cultures and greater performance.

Pay matters. So do good managers, flexibility, trust and the everyday experience of work. But the strongest workplaces also offer something fundamental: A clear sense of what the organisation is trying to achieve, why it matters and how each person contributes to making it happen.

So what makes somewhere a genuinely good place to work? For an employee, the answer is unlikely to begin with a corporate purpose statement. It will be much more immediate. Am I treated fairly? Do I trust my manager? Is the workload reasonable? Am I listened to? Can I do good work without fighting the organisation around me? Does the organisation keep its promises?

All of these things matter enormously. New Zealand’s Best Places to Work™ 2026 Employee Experience Survey reinforces the point. When employees were asked what mattered most to them at work, 74.6 per cent included people and culture among their three most important factors, compared with 35.4 per cent who selected compensation. Supportive managers, flexibility and being able to be themselves at work also featured strongly.

But buried within that everyday experience is another question that is easy to overlook — do I understand what this organisation is trying to achieve, and can I see how my work contributes to it? That is the meeting point where organisational purpose enters the employee experience.

Not purpose as a slogan. Not an assertion that the organisation exists to make the world a better place. And certainly not another piece of employer branding designed to persuade people that their job is more meaningful than it really is.

Purpose, properly understood, is an organisation’s meaningful reason to exist, grounded in the enduring value it creates through its performance and its contribution to the long-term wellbeing of people and the planet. In a purpose-driven organisation, that understanding becomes the organising principle for strategy, decisions, priorities, behaviour and performance.

From an employee’s perspective, this matters because work rarely happens in isolation. Every day people are asked to make choices, resolve competing priorities, collaborate with others, respond to customers and decide where to put their limited time and attention. The clearer the organising logic of the business, the easier it becomes to understand not simply what needs to be done, but why. That distinction has consequences.

A sizeable body of research has found a strong relationship between experiencing work as meaningful and outcomes including engagement, commitment and job satisfaction. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Management Studies, covering 44 studies and more than 23,000 people, found particularly strong associations between meaningful work and all three. It also found a relationship with lower intentions to withdraw from an organisation.

Organisational purpose and meaningful work are not the same thing, and we should be wary of pretending that a carefully articulated purpose can somehow make every task inspirational. Few people arrive at work each morning requiring transcendence before opening their inbox. But purpose can create the conditions in which work makes greater sense.

It can provide line of sight between an individual job and a larger organisational endeavour. It can help managers explain decisions rather than merely announce them. It can give teams a common reference point when priorities compete. And it can make autonomy more practical because people have a clearer framework within which to exercise judgement. Most importantly, perhaps, it gives employees something against which to judge the organisation itself.

This is where purpose becomes much more demanding than the purpose statement suggests. Employees experience the gap between words and actions more closely than almost anyone else. They see which behaviours are rewarded. They know whether a stated commitment survives contact with a difficult commercial decision. They experience whether leaders listen, whether customers really matter, whether values disappear when targets are under pressure and whether the organisation behaves consistently when nobody is preparing a presentation about its culture. In that sense, employee experience is one of the toughest tests of whether an organisation is genuinely purpose driven.

A business cannot credibly claim that its purpose guides how it creates enduring value while treating the people expected to deliver that purpose simply as a cost to be managed. Equally, an organisation with a friendly culture, generous benefits and an impressive employee proposition can still leave people confused about where it is going, what really matters and how their work contributes. The two dimensions need each other.

This is also why being purpose driven should not be confused with making work easy. Some of the best workplaces are highly demanding. They expect excellent performance, make difficult decisions and ask a great deal of their people. What distinguishes them is not an absence of pressure, but greater coherence around why the effort matters, what is expected and how success is achieved.

Purpose therefore sits upstream of much of what we describe as employee experience. When it genuinely shapes strategy and behaviour, it can influence how leaders lead, how managers manage, how teams collaborate, what gets measured and rewarded, and how people understand the contribution they are being asked to make.

That connection is one of the reasons Neil Gaught & Associates has entered into partnership with Best Places to Work.

We approach the organisation from different but highly complementary directions. Best Places to Work begins with the lived experience of employees. Its awards process starts with confidential employee feedback before organisations can progress to independent assessment, deliberately testing the difference between what an organisation says about itself and what its people actually experience.

At NG&A, our starting point is the organisation’s core purpose and the work required to make it an organising principle for governance, strategy, culture, operations and performance. Both approaches ultimately come together in how purpose is translated into everyday organisational practice.

That is also why NG&A is sponsoring the Purpose in Action Award at this year’s Best Places to Work Awards. The category recognises organisations working to embed purpose into strategy, decision-making and everyday action, creating outcomes for employees as well as customers, communities and the organisation itself.

Next Thursday, 22 October, the 2026 Best Places to Work Awards will bring together organisations from across Aotearoa New Zealand that are trying to create better experiences for their people.

There will be much to celebrate. But behind the awards sits a more important idea. The best places to work are not created by perks, statements or culture programmes alone. They are created when people can see a connection between what an organisation is there to achieve, the decisions its leaders make, the work they themselves do and the value that work creates. When those things align, purpose stops being something employees are told about and becomes something they experience.