Looking beyond the doors: A powerful employment motivator

Earning a degree is one thing. Trying to attain employment is another. Yet finding that ideal workspace with location, services, local amenities, and internal provisions of which the employer and office workspace provides is something often not seen.

If you were going for your dream job with an ideal and average salary - say as a journalist or news reporter, and it turned out you were to work in a small, cramped office with no natural light and poor equipment, in a basement of a building in the middle of nowhere: would you take it still?

Glassdoor.com just released the top fifty employers with the most photos of their workplaces: Yahoo!, Adobe, eBay, our very own CBS Interactive, AT&T, YouTube and Google to name a few - all of which gives a prospective employee an inside look at the place they could work; offering an honest and true depiction of these working environments.

I have two offices for two very separate things. One at home, where I live and where I am writing this, and one on the university campus in a bright, spacious and constantly changing environment. Though the office on campus is often noisy as it is located next to the student's union bar, it offers me a higher motivation to work as it provides lesser distraction. Plus, it is in a busy student hub of the university which makes everything I could possibly need a stones throw away.

But working from home though may seem like a positive and a benefit for those with dependents, not only does the current infrastructure of virtual private networking and inter-campus collaboration struggle, it may well end up churning out nearly half of all workers in five years time.

Working in an office does have benefits, and it is difficult to truly explain unless you are there. Besides the initial buzz you will get, you will soon become part of an ecosystem which relies on symbiotic relationships between the people who work there.

In many cases, experienced employees will for example learn that it isn't the management who control the employees, more so it's the administrative sub-sector of human resources which can pound the iron fist of the office culture.

So before you reach out for work, at least try and opt for an in-person inteview to see the place you will spend your days. A healthy, happy and comfortable environment leads to a better workforce. And as something the Generation X will know, flexibility and the chance to take advantage of "home away from home" perks is a major motivational factor.

Why do you think Hannibal Lecter wanted a window? Because unless you are already nuts, you'll soon become so in a cramped, dark space.