Putting Your Work on the Refrigerator

Remember when you were a kid and the refrigerator was where everything important was displayed? If you did well on a test or painted a watercolor of the dog, mom and dad would put it on the door with a magnet to celebrate your hard work.

As we get older, our work often becomes less visible or harder to explain to the average person.

Has your team had the opportunity to do something they’re proud of that they could easily explain to their friends and family?

Sometimes you have to create them.

At Comfort Research we recently constructed the world’s largest bean bag. It’s official – Guinness World Records was in Grand Rapids, Michigan to certify it. It measures over 5,224 cubic feet and weighs 4,000 pounds. If you want to catch a glimpse, it will be on display until October 8 as part of ArtPrize (a massive annual public art competition).

As you can imagine, it got a lot of attention:

A giant, multi-colored bean bag on top of a building is easy to understand. Everyone can relate to the work that went into concepting, designing, sewing, and building something like that. All of our employees can point to it as an example of our fun/creative culture and mission of “comfort for all.”

Our employees are rockstars at what they do – from lean manufacturing to sustainable practices to hitting productivity targets. Most people don’t understand those technical terms, but they do understand you must be good at what you do if you’re breaking world records.

Have you given your team an opportunity lately to do something that’s refrigerator-worthy?