What is Your Work or Living Space Saying?

We've all heard the saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words," but sometimes the places we work and live and say just as much. In long term care settings, you're trained to be courteous and attentive to your residents' needs, but how much thought do you give to what the building itself might be communicating? We all know how important body language can be to communication, but it's not often that we think about what the living and work areas of a building might say. Long Term Living magazine addressed this issue in a recent article, and it gives you a lot to think about.

Wall colors, the arrangement of furniture, an things like whether or not people are behind a counter really do matter. You can't influence the layout of a building once it's built, but there any many things you can do to the inside spaces to make them as welcoming and home-like as possible.

For example, "In traditional nursing homes, the design of the nurses’ station, break room, dining room, lobby, conference room and residents’ rooms all have influence on communication and language because their designs signal who will speak there, what types of language to use in each, when it is appropriate to talk in each space and who is invited to do so. Therefore, one significant way to change language in nursing homes is to redesign spaces so that elders have more opportunities to converse in private in more places with people of their choosing—friends, family and staff, or to be alone if they wish."

Read more here: http://www.ltlmagazine.com/article/spaces-and-interpersonal-communication