The New Perk for Your Employees: An Art Rental for Their Home Offices

When Covid first picked up steam, a lot of us figured that any changes to our daily lives would be temporary. However, six months later, things are feeling a lot different. And in no realm is this more true than when it comes to work and the rise of home offices. 

Home offices, in the early days of the pandemic, were makeshift operations. Perhaps a repurposed corner of the kitchen table, or a desk that you share with your partner or roommates. Zoom calls were conducted out in the open, which led to lots of feature appearances from dogs, kids, and family. But, given a few months, all of those quick fixes started to feel a bit inadequate. If you’re like me, I didn’t really have any office space to speak of until the beginning of the summer, when I caved and finally bought a real desk.

And as our home offices becomes semi-permanent, it’s important that we shift our thinking and start to treat that space as a real office. Whether this means getting a lock on the door, upgrading your webcam, or buying a decent office chair, we’re spending a lot of time in our home offices and it’s time to invest in them. 

Your surroundings and atmosphere while you do work is linked to your productivity and happiness. When you feel comfortable, excited, and inspired by your home office, you are ensuring your best possible performance at work. While we do believe that the office is not obsolete, and that someday we will all go back to work physically, it may be a while. And why not make the most of that time by organizing your space, introducing color to your walls, and making your home office somewhere that you want to be.

The Covid Pivot

As an organization that mobilizes art rentals for corporate spaces that then fund our art programs in local public schools, the onset of Covid and the suspension of most in-person work spaces became a bit of a pickle. While the conditions on the ground vary, our art rental services have continued to motor ahead, in a few ways.

When we checked in with our good friend and client Rebekah Kohmescher, CEO of Altair Advisers, she let us know that most of her staff was working from home, something we had anticipated. That’s why we decided to only slightly pivot our core art rental service to allow our clients to have their employees take a piece of art to their home office for as long as they are working remotely. Cool, right?!

Rebekah loved the pivot, and now we’re working with them for a 5th year in a row while selecting new art for their employees and helping to fund more of our free art programming in local schools. A huge win-win!

You can still rent art for your offices as always, but now we have this new way to help leaders really support and engage their team by showing they care that their home office be an engaging, professional space for their own work and any Zoom calls.

Why Our Art Rental Service Stands Apart

If you’re familiar with IPaintMyMind and what we do, you might know that we have an art rental program for offices and commercial real estate. We source the prints from the network of artists which make up our diverse Permanent Collection, and rent them out on a rotating basis to offices and workspaces across the city. Besides looking amazing and raising company morale, this program has substantial social impact.  

By participating in our art rental service, you and your company will be giving back to our programs in schools and community hubs across the city. The fee that your space pays will go right back into sustainable arts programs in education spaces which are underfunded and underserved, like Chicago Public Schools. And, you are facilitating long-lasting, well-paid opportunities for talented local artists. 

We pay our artists fairly, and upfront. 

We wanted to create a super unique way to give back as a company or office. With IPMM’s art rentals program your space gets a makeover, and you ensure high quality arts programming for students all across Chicago. Getting amazing art has never felt so good!

How-To: An Art Rental Service For Your Home Office

Of course, these days, most of us aren’t in the office. Our office has become the kitchen table, the home office, or any number of other places. That’s why we decided that our art rental clients can send their artwork home with their team members to hang in their home offices, or wherever else. Art brightens, inspires, and connects, and we all need a bit of that right now! 

Just schedule your free consultation call with IPMM to get started. We’ll get to know your team, and figure out how many pieces you need and what kind of art fits your collective personalities. Then, we’ll drop off the prints at your office space, where your employees can come and grab their new piece of art! They get to keep the piece for a year, or until you all return to working in your office, whichever comes first.

We can give you advice on how to properly hang your piece at home, and would love to receive a finished picture of your space with your new IPaintMyMind art print hanging. Just because we were not able to choose our office spaces these days doesn’t mean that they can’t look amazing and be super functional. 

Whether filling up that blank wall behind you on Zoom calls, or hanging above your desk for renewed inspiration, a new piece of art will help mix it up and keep your workspace fresh. In the sixth month of working from home, that’s a valuable thing.

We hope that this shift in our art rentals program will provide you with yet another way to give back. Let your team know that you appreciate them and all of the adapting that they’ve had to do, by treating them to a stellar art print for their home office. In this time of isolation and missing workplace culture and camaraderie, we hope that that art rental service for your home office can help you capture just a bit of that again. 

Get started today with a free consultation call.