What three things reveal your importance in a company? 1) Your own office. 2) Your own office. 3) Your own office.

Ninety-five per cent of office workers are battery hens confined to a 5ft workstation. Their personal phone calls are public; they live with their colleagues’ takeaway sandwiches; they’ve had greater privacy on a camping holiday.

Workers with their own offices are better off: more important, more powerful, more managerial. So, if you haven’t got one, it’s time to get one.

First, identify a vacant space. Second, find a reason to use it.

Here are three good ones: you have a confidential project to work on; you are dealing on the phone with sensitive clients; important customers are coming to meet you.

Now take it slowly, leave your jacket on your usual chair and move back and forth between your two workstations. Remember your place in the office coffee round. We are going to grab that space in a series of small steps that your colleagues barely notice. Let them find it normal to see you in there. If others think that they can use it too, explain — in an embarrassed kind of way — that you have confidential work.

Soon, people will associate you with that office. Then they will start to think it is yours. Now it’s time to procure a key. Remember, you are doing a confidential report in there, so you should have the means to lock up, just as it is logical that the switchboard should have a second extension number for you and that the IT department should open up the PC for you.

But it’s still not really my office, you say. Do squatters spend their time worrying about their rights to premises? They don’t; nor should you. One day someone from management might realise that an office that should be empty isn’t. Until then, treat it as your own.

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