Picture frames, ticket stubs and glitter: The portrait of an engaged employee?

The way you decorate your home or apartment says a lot about you.

For example, lots of ceramic figurines and doilies: Crazy cat lady.

Beer can collection and posters of John Belushi: Frat boy who never grew up.

Meticulously tidy with surrealistic pictures of nudes: Pretentious art poser. Or serial killer.

The same goes for how you decorate your cubical or office. As HR managers, I don’t know if you discourage decorations. Maybe you think it distracts people from their work. Or maybe you think it allows people to showcase their personalities.

The message is clear. It’s time for lunch!

But, anyway, if you can certainly learn a lot from people if they do decorate their office spaces.

If you came over to my desk right now, you would think it was straight out of A Beautiful Mind. You know, that Russell Crowe movie where he plays a schizophrenic who tapes up all sorts of newspaper articles and thinks that they’re sending him a message. I have all sorts of html codes and phone numbers and reminders to myself, written on post-its and scraps of paper and cocktail napkins (it’s sexier that way). Sure, I could put it all in my Outlook or on my computer desktop. But this is easier for me. I also have some photos and ticket stubs and the vase left over from when my boyfriend sent me roses on my birthday last year (which is quickly coming around again, by the way. But no pressure).

So what’s the message? I think it conveys that I’m a hard worker, and it also reflects some of my outside interests.

At a previous job, I had a coworker who would decorate his cube for each holiday. And I’m talking TV sitcom, all-out decorations. Talking skeletons and cobwebs for Halloween, lights for Christmas, trees for Arbor Day…well, OK, maybe not trees. But you get the picture. It was pretty awesome. And you could tell that he was a fun-loving guy who would always be up for conversation if you stopped by his desk. Which he was.

When I was right out of college, I had a job for two weeks at an unethical, and possibly illegal, company where they wouldn’t allow me to fill out a W-2 (they wanted to pay me under the table). I was discouraged from taking a lunch break even though I had to put in crazy hours. Obviously, I wasn’t happy. So I didn’t decorate my cubicle at all.

And my employer took notice.

I was “let go” (although, never having filled out tax forms, was I really ever there to begin with?), and one of the reasons they mentioned was because I didn’t decorate. So they felt that I wasn’t really engaged and didn’t care about the job.

I wasn’t and didn’t.

There you go.

What do you think about employees who decorate their desks? If it’s a company where mostly everyone has something up, as an HR manager, would you take it as a red flag of a disengaged employee if he has no decorations whatsoever? And what does your cube or office say about you?