Lynn Gaines is the office worker's answer to Martha Stewart.
In her 18 years as a designer and illustrator at American Greetings Corp in Cleveland, her cubicle has undergone several renovations: For a few years it was a garden, complete with an arch of fake ivy, pink silk roses and sparkly little lights. Last month she went retro, festooning the arch with rainbow-color fringe and light-reflecting colored plastic disks.
"It's an extension of who you are," Gaines said of her work space.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Her company, she said, advocates office personalizing for its 2,200 employees -- who include designers of greeting cards, gift wrapping and party favors -- to encourage creativity and increase productivity.
But American Greetings is apparently in the minority. A national telephone survey of 640 white-collar workers -- conducted by Steelcase, the office furniture maker, and Opinion Research and released in August -- found that only 40 percent of companies encourage employees to personalize their work space. That number fell from 56 percent a decade earlier.
Office workers are taking the hint: Only 59 percent said they personalize their work space, compared with 85 percent who did so in 1996.
Employees said they didn't want to bother co-workers with whom they share office space, didn't have enough space or a permanent space or wanted to avoid seeming unprofessional.
Sometimes, it isn't their choice. The Hearst Corp, the media giant that owns Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar and Country Living, among other magazines, limits personal knickknacks and vacation photos in the shiny new Hearst Tower designed by Norman Foster in New York.
The policy, which was e-mailed to the 2,000 employees who relocated to the tower and has been posted on the company Intranet, specifies limiting "the amount of personal items, stacks of paper and other materials" kept in the blond-wood and gray-metal work spaces and bans carrying in "furniture or lighting without prior approval."
David Masello, the articles editor at Country Living, says his small new cubicle has less room for "things that give me comfort and inspiration."
"It's things like pictures, postcards and paintings," he said. "In my old office, I had a wall of them. Now, I have one-tenth of that."
At Calvin Klein, the company's minimalist aesthetic trumps employee style. In July 2004 executives decreed there could be no desktop displays of photographs, mementos, toys, awards, plants or flowers, other than white ones.
An e-mail directive sent to employees included, as a guide to decorating, a photograph of a black desk with a small number of appropriate, mostly black accouterments.
Malcolm Carfrae, the company's senior vice president for global communications, declined to confirm whether the policy was still in effect.
Written company directives about office decorating are unusual, said William Casey, a management consultant in Golden, Colorado.
"It's difficult to write clear policies on this issue without coming off as a bureaucratic nut," he said.
"The general rule is your self-expression ends at the point that you disrupt work," said Casey, the president of Executive Leadership Group.
"You can hardly write a policy that says, `Don't put up cartoons,'" said Wendi Peck, the chief executive of the company.
They had a client with an employee who plastered his cubicle with Dilbert cartoons.
The collage created such a "negative and depressing" atmosphere, Peck recalled, that the supervisor ordered them removed, though there was no ban.
Even personal photographs can be anathema. After her second child was born, Kelly Welter, who worked for a large accounting firm in Salem, Oregon, had to jettison her older child's baby picture in favor of an image of the children together, because her employer allowed only one personal picture to a desk.
"I was told that the office had to be extremely professional because clients came in," Welter, 34, said.
In a study, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an assistant professor of management and organizations in the business school at the University of Michigan, found that once personal items exceeded 20 percent of a work space, managers began to question a worker's professionalism,
Sanchez-Burks said he had concluded from studies of the US workplace that there is an unwritten rule that workers separate their personal and work lives.
An antiseptic space, though, can sometimes raise employer suspicions.
"In a Denver insurance company, one exec did nothing to personalize his space at all," said Casey, who is also an organizational psychologist.
"It was completely sterile. His boss worried that he wasn't planning on staying," he said.
The government is aiming to recruit 1,096 foreign English teachers and teaching assistants this year, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The foreign teachers would work closely with elementary and junior-high instructors to create and teach courses, ministry official Tsai Yi-ching (蔡宜靜) said. Together, they would create an immersive language environment, helping to motivate students while enhancing the skills of local teachers, she said. The ministry has since 2021 been recruiting foreign teachers through the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which offers placement, salary, housing and other benefits to eligible foreign teachers. Two centers serving northern and southern Taiwan assist in recruiting and training
WIDE NET: Health officials said they are considering all possibilities, such as bongkrekic acid, while the city mayor said they have not ruled out the possibility of a malicious act of poisoning Two people who dined at a restaurant in Taipei’s Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 last week have died, while four are in intensive care, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. All of the outlets of Malaysian vegetarian restaurant franchise Polam Kopitiam have been ordered to close pending an investigation after 11 people became ill due to suspected food poisoning, city officials told a news conference in Taipei. The first fatality, a 39-year-old man who ate at the restaurant on Friday last week, died of kidney failure two days later at the city’s Mackay Memorial Hospital. A 66-year-old man who dined
‘CARRIER KILLERS’: The Tuo Chiang-class corvettes’ stealth capability means they have a radar cross-section as small as the size of a fishing boat, an analyst said President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday presided over a ceremony at Yilan County’s Suao Harbor (蘇澳港), where the navy took delivery of two indigenous Tuo Chiang-class corvettes. The corvettes, An Chiang (安江) and Wan Chiang (萬江), along with the introduction of the coast guard’s third and fourth 4,000-tonne cutters earlier this month, are a testament to Taiwan’s shipbuilding capability and signify the nation’s resolve to defend democracy and freedom, Tsai said. The vessels are also the last two of six Tuo Chiang-class corvettes ordered from Lungteh Shipbuilding Co (龍德造船) by the navy, Tsai said. The first Tuo Chiang-class vessel delivered was Ta Chiang (塔江)
EYE ON STRAIT: The US spending bill ‘doubles security cooperation funding for Taiwan,’ while also seeking to counter the influence of China US President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law a US$1.2 trillion spending package that includes US$300 million in foreign military financing to Taiwan, as well as funding for Taipei-Washington cooperative projects. The US Congress early on Saturday overwhelmingly passed the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act 2024 to avoid a partial shutdown and fund the government through September for a fiscal year that began six months ago. Under the package, the Defense Appropriations Act would provide a US$27 billion increase from the previous fiscal year to fund “critical national defense efforts, including countering the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” according to a summary