Loud and Proud: What’s Your Ideal Workplace?

Imagine your ideal workplace. What’s it look like? More to the point, what’s it sound like?

The Good Eggs foodhub in San Francisco, where the engineering team resides, isn’t the quietest place I’ve ever worked. Every morning, there’s local farmers wheeling in crate after crate of watermelons and tomatoes and so much more. There’s the sound of our operations team working to get all that food into the right bins and later into the right cars, delivering people good, local food, grown with integrity. There’s the chatter of the daily standup meetings that spring up all around the foodhub throughout the morning as each team gears up for the day.

Is all that action distracting? Not for me! I absolutely love it. When I wake up every morning, I can’t imagine a better, more exciting place to go work. Our foodhub isn’t a shrine to silent contemplation. And it shouldn’t be. It’s a living, breathing part of the new food economy that we’re helping to build.

There are two things in particular that I love about coding in the foodhub.

Rapid Feedback

Last week, we on the “operations tools” team built some new features to use barcodes and scanners to make it easier to keep track of the food we receive at the foodhub every morning. Tuesday afternoon, we pushed the code to production. Wednesday morning, the receiving lead in San Francisco, Zach, used the new tools to check in that day’s food as it arrived. Some features worked well, and some didn’t, so he walked the twenty yards over to our cluster of desks and told us about it. Wednesday afternoon, we pushed some updates. Thursday morning, Zach used it again and gave us his stamp of approval.

It’s easy to talk about the value of rapid prototyping. I think it’s tough to imagine really making it happen without the easy communication that our foodhub creates.

Task Significance: Finding Meaning in Work

What makes for good work? People point to many different things: interesting challenges. Room for creativity. Great teammates. Constant learning and growth. I’ve found all of those in abundance at Good Eggs.

But most of all, I’ve found meaning in my work here. Theorists of work describe “task significance” as the perception that one’s job has a positive impact on other people. Not surprisingly, task significance is strongly correlated with higher performance and satisfaction at work.

Task significance is easy to come by at Good Eggs. Every day, the foodhub reminds me of why I’m working here. I’m working to support the farmer who shows up at our foodhub twice a week, selling locally, organically grown produce. I’m working to support our awesome, skilled operations team as they lovingly sort through produce, carefully pack bags, and efficiently deliver food to our waiting customers. I’m working to support the people who will soon receive their orders, so that they can eat delicious, healthy meals while participating in a thriving local economy.

Task significance? Heck yes.

In the 19th century, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.”

With all due respect, Arthur, I disagree. If the noise in question is the sound of a local, ethical, friendly food economy growing and thriving, then I want to work right in the middle of it.

What makes a good workplace for you? Let us know!

Originally posted by Adam Perelman on Aug 4, 2014.