For Ms. Paquette, the biggest hit has been to her social life. “If you step out at 9 p.m. on a Saturday, there’s not a ton going on the way there was in Brooklyn,” she said. No longer can she text her friends and immediately meet one somewhere in the neighborhood.

The move has had another significant impact on her life — nearly eliminating her commute. Now, rather than spending two and a half hours a day on subways and PATH trains, she spends about 20 minutes walking to and from the office. Already, Ms. Paquette cooks more at home and has taken on more volunteer opportunities with the company.

Audible didn’t decide to help pay the rent because it was concerned workers spent too much time in transit. Yet this unintended consequence may be the one that delivers the biggest impact. Moving a few dozen workers to Newark isn’t going to save the city. But reducing commute time could drastically improve a worker’s quality of life. The hours we spend each day sitting on trains, buses and in our cars contributes to our collective misery. Anyone who has ever had an hourslong commute knows that time spent in transit means less time to do things like go to the gym, hang out with friends or even just pet the cat. Shorten your commute and odds are you’ll be happier and healthier.

“Next to housework, the thing that we most dependably hate about our daily lives is our commute,” said Dan Buettner, the author of “The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People” (National Geographic, 2015). “To virtually eliminate our commute is probably one of the best things Mr. Katz could have done to improve the lives of his employees.”

When Amy Garas, 36, the executive assistant to Audible’s chief financial officer, entered the housing lottery, she was thinking about the two hours she spent in her car each day driving back and forth from her apartment in Somerset County, N.J. “If I didn’t work at Audible, I don’t know if I would have been so eager to move” to Newark, she said. “But having a really great commute was a huge selling point.”

Since she won a spot in the Hahne building, she has spent time exploring her new surroundings. Among her latest finds: an alcoholic milkshake at the Tops Diner on Passaic Avenue in East Newark. She has a long list of things she plans to do with that extra daily two hours of her life she just got back. “It’s been more of a game changer than I realized it would be,” she said.