Love your office...

Published on Thu 11 Feb 2010

If you're not feeling the love this Valentine's Day, here's 7 reasons why you really should love your office...

♥   Many of us meet our friends and partners at work. A recent study showed that around 60 per cent of people have had a relationship with somebody at work.

♥   Work has an important role to play in our well being. It structures our time, develops us as people, provides us with social interaction and in many cases is also inherently rewarding. When we do not love what we do, we find it more difficult to do it well.

♥   Being unemployed makes us unhappy. Research shows that there is a great deal of psychological distress associated with lack of work. We need to work, be occupied and around other people. The jobs we do may not always please us, but happiness can only be found in where we are right now.

♥   Love the place you’re in. What surrounds us on a day to day basis plays an important role in deciding how we feel about what we do and who we are. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once wrote ‘I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself’.

♥   What we do at work and how we feel about it has a knock on effect for the rest of our lives. So always remember that stress comes in two parts – the pressure (which we can’t do a lot about) and our reaction to it (which we can). Share the complaints of the day with the ones you love, but let them have the remains of the day.

♥   Bunking off is OK. The days when work was done at a specific time and in a specific place are gone. Time and place are malleable. So, now and then, there is nothing wrong with a decision to shape time to suit ourselves and our loved ones. Leave the office, turn the Blackberry off, go out for dinner.

♥   Our own work shows how office interiors can help us to be happy and more productive. Properly planned and well designed space is not only a reflection of what we do for a job but also how we feel as people. Great things are possible when design is in tune with the values and desires of people and the firms for which they work.