Working Environment

Your interactions with your colleagues are a small portion of the collection of experiences and inputs that make up your entire working environment. Unsurprisingly, the best environment is no less personal than the best trade-off between solitary and team working; the best I can do here is describe what's worked for me and some of the things you could consider to reflect on your own environment.

Firstly, if you're working somewhere that expects a "standard" desk layout with no decoration or personalization, that's just not a very healthy environment at all. People like to decorate their environments to express their individuality—https://www.colorado.edu/cmci/academics/communication. A homogeneous workspace may be good for ensuring the facilities manager's magnolia paint does not get stained but does not allow employees any creative freedom. Constraining the creativity of our software makers is not good for making creative software...