Book publication: The Vital Office Concept

Excerpt:

The time that people spend working in the office is a regular part of life that has impacts on people’s health. The office is a working environment with many physical and psychological demands, challenges, and stresses which have a long-term effect on the person working in an office. These demands, challenges, and stresses in offices can cause psychological problems and physical ailments. A meticulous and holistic design of the working environment, however, can promote creativeness and significantly contribute to the wellbeing of body and mind. This design also promotes productivity and innovation.

The Vital-Office Concept gives architects and designers many insights and new inspirations concerning the design of more ergonomic and healthy offices.

 

The author Peter Jordan is the founder of Vital-Office, an umbrella world for a unique and holistic way of designing office environments.

BIO: Grown up in a family based German wood manufacturing he learned traditional craftsmanship and the principles of sustainable design. His business led him to ergonomics already in the early 1980’s when he started producing adjustable computer furniture. In 1989 he was the first in Germany to design anthropometric rounded desk systems and introduced new performance enhancing psychological and sociological effects in ergonomic office planning.

He has lectured on "Vital-Office Ergonomics and Feng Shui" in Germany since 2006. Many Feng Shui consultants, architects, facility managers and office dealer already participated in the seminars.

On the subject of "Office Optimization: Ergonomics and Feng Shui," he regularly speaks at several conferences and other events. In 2007 he was a speaker at the International Congress of Facility Management in Frankfurt, at the international Feng Shui conference in Budapest, and at the Conscious Design conference held in New Jersey in the United States. In 2009 he spoke at the 4th International Conference on Scientific Feng Shui & Built Environment at Hong Kong City University.

He is working on the development of the Vital-Office concept since 2003. The philosophical basis of this concept was tested and enhanced through many real office installations all over the world.

With this book now a part of this experiences and concepts are published to a wider range of office people involved in this subject.

 

Foreword by Dr. Hans-Dieter Schat

Integral office design is a requirement for excellent Management

The striving for outstanding results is presumably as old as humanity. Our Stone Age ancestors have not left any reports behind for us about this so that we must rely on our suppositions. In today’s discussion we are on safer ground when we are dealing with the origin of Business Excellence.

The decisive impetus came from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, who set off in 1982 "In Search of Excellence"- the title of their bestseller. Peters and Waterman obtained eight principles of excellence from the analysis of the best companies at the time:

A bias for action, active decision making - ‘getting on with it’: trying comes above studying.

Close to the customer: Not only the striving for customer satisfaction but also learning from the customer and developing innovations jointly with the customer.

Autonomy and entrepreneurship– also and especially then when risks are involved.

Productivity through people, and, in fact, through all the people who work in the company or are involved with it. Not only productivity through managers!

Hands-on, value-driven, the emphasis is on the actually "hands-on" management practice.

Stick to the knitting, no diversification into different sectors.

Simple form, lean staff: only as many management and specialist teams as necessary.

Simultaneous loose-tight properties, that is tight in the basic orientation and targets, loose in the choice of means

Subsequently, Peters and Waterman were heavily criticized but you must first acknowledge their contributions: With the book "In Search of Excellence" the subject was presented to a broad public in the Western world. "Excellence" in companies was suddenly no longer only the concern of the boss, but was discussed on all levels. Since this book you no longer overlook the subject of Business Excellence in management theory and the authors are responsible for this input. Basically, the criticism of their work is based on two arguments:

Some of the "excellent" companies selected by Peters and Waterman got into economic difficulties soon after the book was published.

It remained unclear how these eight principles are connected, how they can be implemented together in a company.

The first point of criticism concerns all the concepts of business management and management theory: current success does not guarantee future success. No one has yet found a concept which guarantees business management success for the long term. Success must be worked at anew time and time again.

The second point of criticism went deeper and led to the development of management models which wanted to bring the different perspectives, criteria and demands into one integral approach and an integrated assessment.

Probably the most well-known of these models, at least in Europe, is the Business Excellence Model of the European Foundation for Quality Management. This model was developed since 1988 by representatives of leading European companies and has new criteria which are divided into two groups: the facilitators and the results.

Why are not only the results recorded?

In an early stage you can only determine that a company is using more resources, for example, for the improvement of employee motivation or process stability. Only later will it be possible to observe the results in our example with more innovations through qualified employees or more stable processes.

The EFQM model of Business Excellence, due to the consideration of facilitators, is in the position to record approaches for improvement very early. The new criteria are as follows in the current version:

Facilitators:

Management

Employees

Strategy

Partnerships and resources

Processes, products and services

Results:

Employee-related results

Customer-related results

Company-related results

Key results

Consequently, the criteria of Peters and Waterman have not been overtaken but put into a frame and made available for an integral contemplation.

The development of office concepts reflects the development of Business Excellence concepts just outlined.

Office design started with individual criteria: size of the desk tops and the access routes to the window, the strength of the lighting and limitation of reflections, perhaps also a sensible arrangement of work medium or storage.

All these criteria were introduced with good reasons; serious disregard of these criteria leads to injuries and job-related illnesses of the office worker. But these criteria stand for themselves; they lack an integrating concept. With the taking account of table sizes and lighting strength perhaps an injury-free office can be designed, but definitely no excellent office.

Office design has an unusual quality which obviously makes the taking over of an integral approach more difficult: an office and its furnishings consist of objects which are noticeable in isolation.

No one would say : "This company has improved its innovation management in the frame of EFQM, therefore we will also improve our innovation management and we will automatically be excellent."

But some say: "This company has introduced free-form surfaces and 2-component lighting and increased the efficiency in the office. Therefore, we will also buy desks with free-form surfaces and a couple of 2-component lights and increase our efficiency likewise."

The one functions as little as the other. The winners of prizes in the frame of the EFQM model show outstanding achievements in all criteria and the process is coordinated for the individual criteria.

It is no different in the office: only one integral process, starting with the planning and the involvement of the employees through to realization, resulting in office workplaces in which the employees can live Business Excellence.

The author: Dr. Hans-Dieter Schat studied economics and social sciences, served in the 1990s as office organiser in the automobile industry and is now senior researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for System and Innovation Research ISI.