Like many of you, the Space2BE team had their Christmas party this week at Coombe Abbey. It’s a great event – a chance to let our hair down and relax, but also to see each other in a different light. We spend so much of our time at work and connected to our colleagues – almost as much as we spend with our family – so it’s incredibly important to enjoy our work relationships. If we like each other, spark off each other and work well together, we can deliver excellent things for our clients. It matters that we all are friends. When Space2BE was first established we decided that being ‘fun’ to work with should be one of our brand values, and it has served us well. We think that in order to be fun to work with, we need to have fun together. So this is a time to bond, relax, and build our work relationships still further. Fun is important, but it can also be instructive. Not everyone, for example, has the same idea of what ‘fun’ is – karaoke, for example, might be one person’s idea of heaven but send many others scuttling for a dark corner (or wishing fervently that they’d caught the virus that’s going around). But I think that if it has taken us until the Christmas party to realise that we’ve organised something that someone on our team finds excruciating, embarrassing or hopelessly painful, something has gone seriously wrong along the way. We should know our people better than that. In our work people often tell us that they really want to work with people they like (or value, or respect, or ideally all three). If we can find colleagues who give us all these things I think we are incredibly lucky – and at Space2BE, I think we have. We’d all like to wish you a very happy Christmas and a successful and prosperous New Year. See you in 2015!

“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” Dale Carnegie