One minute. Before the next meeting, the next email, the next decision. One minute to ask yourself whether what you do looks anything like who you are. Because purpose at work starts with that question.
By Ángel Bonet, founder and president of ImpactCo
One question has followed me for years. It turns up unannounced: in an airport boarding queue, driving home at night, in that strange silence left in a room once an important meeting ends and everyone has gone. The question is simple. Does what I am doing look like who I am?
Frankly, I haven’t always liked the answer.
Twenty-five years in business have taught me something no management manual covers. I have founded companies, sat on boards and advised chairs and business families through decisions that changed the fate of thousands of people. Yet most of the brilliant people I know live at a speed that stops them asking that question. It isn’t a lack of awareness. It’s a lack of air. And it is why purpose at work has become so hard to find.
Seven out of eight
For more than a decade, Gallup has measured how many people around the world feel genuinely involved in their jobs. Its latest State of the Global Workplace report, published in April with 2025 data, puts the global average at 20%. In Europe, the figure falls to 12%, the lowest of any region on the planet, and it has held that position for six consecutive years.
Only 1 in 8 Europeans feels engaged at work.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026Read that slowly. In other words, seven out of eight Europeans spend most of their waking hours on something they don’t connect with. They clock in on Monday and leave on Friday without once feeling that what they do matters. Among them sit a great many executives. Probably many of the people reading this.
I don’t see this as a human-resources problem. Rather, I see it as the symptom of something deeper: a disconnection between what we believe and what we do. That gap carries a cost no profit-and-loss account fully captures. Talent that dims. Decisions taken on autopilot. Projects delivered correctly and without soul. Put simply, the absence of purpose at work is expensive.
Stop. Look.
So today I don’t want to talk about strategy. Instead, I want to ask you for something much harder. Breathe.
So stop for a moment and look at the world. Not this morning’s headline or the latest market figure. The world. Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of work faster than anyone fully controls. The gap between those who have and those who don’t keeps widening. The planet hands us the bill for our decisions every summer, with more force. Meanwhile, a young generation watches companies with a mix of scepticism and hope that we should take very seriously.
Then look inwards. Open last week’s calendar. Go through every meeting, every decision, every difficult conversation you had or dodged. Then ask yourself honestly, without decoration: how much of this looks like the values I would teach my children?
I have three. When I ask myself that question thinking of them, the answer becomes very clear. There is nowhere left to hide.
Where purpose at work multiplies
If you don’t like the answer, that’s all right. Truly. Having drifted off course isn’t the serious part. The serious part is staying on that course knowing it isn’t yours. Still, you can always turn, and the place where that turn carries most force is precisely your job.
In our personal lives we touch a handful of people. Professionally, every decision multiplies. Consider a finance director who chooses to pay small suppliers on time, rather than stretching payments to the limit. That choice can save a company that had no idea how to reach the end of the month. Similarly, a team leader who credits someone publicly changes the climate of an entire plant. And a committee that refuses to launch a product it knows is unhealthy protects thousands of customers who will never learn its name.
Colleagues, suppliers, customers, products, services. Each one is a channel through which who we are travels far beyond us. There sits the real exponential lever, long before technology or capital: people who decide, every day, to put what they value inside what they do. That is purpose at work, and it compounds.
Winning, yes. Not at any price.
Let me be clear, because this argument is easily misread. Making money is good. Growing is good. It is fair that those who contribute most, work hardest and show the most talent should go furthest. Meritocracy is one of the best ideas we have had, and I don’t believe in a company that apologises for being profitable.
But there are lines. We all know where they are, even when we pretend not to see them.
Not enriching a few at the expense of everyone else. Never climbing by making a colleague’s life harder, taking credit for their work or letting them fall when convenient. And certainly not building products and services we know perfectly well are unhealthy, that damage the environment our children will live in, or that simply add nothing to anyone except our own margin.
Whoever crosses those lines may make a great deal of money for a while. Indeed, I have seen it. What I have never seen is anyone who, at the end of the road, looks back and feels proud of it.
Purpose at work is what remains
Deep down, we are all after the same thing, whatever name we give it. Contributing. Progressing. Helping others. Meeting real needs. Feeling that our time here served for something, and leaving the world slightly better than we found it.
Transcending, in short. However, the good news is hard to see when we are short of air: we don’t have to choose between transcending and prospering. Indeed, the common good is the best source of economic profit I know, and purpose at work is where it begins. I see it every week in the companies we work with: when purpose is real, when it lives inside management rather than on a plaque in reception, it eventually shows up in the accounts. That is why corporate purpose has become a survival strategy.
Last week, for example, I saw it with a clarity that stays with me. I taught a class on the Human Resources Master’s programme at the Universidad de Navarra. In front of me sat a group of very well-prepared young people with solid values, the kind you notice before anyone opens their mouth. We started with data, management models and profit-and-loss accounts. At one specific moment, though, something shifted in the room. It shifted when they understood that another way of looking at life and business exists, a more human one, and that the purpose economy is neither a fashion nor one more department. It is the axis capable of transforming the economy and society at the same time: the path towards economic flourishing of a kind we have not seen in the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution began.
Their eyes were shining. Honestly, I’m not exaggerating. You could see something click inside them: their soul, their sense of meaning, their values, suddenly connected to what they want to devote their working lives to. I left thinking that this connection shouldn’t be a privilege of being twenty-five. Instead, any of us, at any age and in any role, can recover purpose at work by giving ourselves permission to stop.
I have always understood leadership as the art of making the eyes of those around you shine. That day, they were the ones who reminded me.
In Latin, conspirare meant to breathe together. To me, that is a beautiful way to think about a company: a group of people breathing at the same rhythm because they share a reason to be there. Ultimately, that shared reason is purpose at work.
So today, before you open the next email, stop. Breathe. Look. And if you find that the course isn’t yours, change it. After all, purpose at work is not a destination. It is never too late to start leaving a mark.
If doing that makes you feel something has to move in your company, your team or yourself, and you’d like to think it through in company, write to us at tribu@impactco.es. Breathing together is always easier.