Herman Miller White Papers

ERGONOMICS >

Body Support in the Office: Sitting, Seating, and Low Back Pains (197kb PDF)
Clerical workers stood on the job until around the middle of the nineteenth century. When employers concluded that their workers might be more productive in a seated position, people began to sit at the office.

Cross Performance at Work: What New Roles Mean to the Chairs We Sit In (122kb PDF)
Companies today are faced with adjusting their office environments to the activities and demographics of a changing work force. The people responsible for making these adjustments may soon be speaking in terms of "cross performance."

Musculoskeletal Disorders (769kb PDF)
The term "cumulative trauma disorders," or "CTDs," refers to a large category of disorders of the muscles, tendons, or nerves. In order to be a CTD, these disorders must be caused, precipitated, or aggravated by repeated exertions or movements of the body. Typical symptoms include persistent pain, swelling, tingling, numbness, or heat around the affected area, both while working and resting.

Everybody Deserves a Good Chair (84kb PDF)
You may be asking yourself what difference it makes: A chair is a chair, right? Well, not quite. First, people who sit down to work for long periods of time run a high risk of low-back injury, second only to those who lift heavy weights; and the risks increase with age. Also, the total number of lost work days and the cost of each back injury are increasing.

If the Chair Fits (279kb PDF)
The old adage, "People come in all shapes and sizes," is a tired cliche to a lot of people. To those who design and manufacture office chairs, it's a daily reminder of the difficult task they face: making chairs that fit a tremendously varied population. Walk through the offices of just about any company and you'll see people of vastly different sizes and proportions. You will notice diminutive workers whose feet barely touch the floor, as well as more lanky colleagues with knees awkwardly extended well beyond the front edge of their chairs. Some may weigh twice as much as others and may be more than a foot taller. Using the chair's adjustment features can make some people more comfortable, but others must endure the aggravation of chairs that don't fit correctly.

Vision and the Computerized Office (399kb PDF)
In the past, concern for worker safety involved primarily avoiding accidental injuries or deaths resulting from hazards in the factory or other industrial environment. Today, with the office as the most common work setting, attention has turned toward more subtle but still serious health problems associated with office work—especially cumulative trauma disorders and vision disorders.

WORK ENVIRONMENTS >

New Directions in Call Center Design: Demanding Challenges for a Complex Workplace (522kb PDF)
Today's call centers have evolved to become sophisticated, high-tech showcases of service, support, and sales. For companies that interact with customers primarily through their call center, it is often the only opportunity they have to build a relationship with customers. Aside from customers and the corporation at large, call centers need to serve the people who work there, too. Many of them are highly educated, highly sought after workers with a command of both technology and interpersonal communications. A comfortable, well-designed workplace can go a long way toward attracting these agents and keeping them on the job. Strategies for accomplishing this include planning for inevitable changes and more technology, achieving density without sacrificing comfort, making use of natural light and views to the outside, and providing furnishings that adjust to support personal preferences.

Making Teamwork Work: Designing Spaces that Support Collaborative Efforts (69kb PDF)
"'Teams' and 'struggle' are two words I hear a lot," say a researcher who has listened to managers, facility planners, and team members from a number of types of companies talk about their efforts to promote and support collaborative work. Despite the benefits that teamwork promises to business organizations determined to improve productivity, quality, and worker commitment, many appear to struggle with the implementation of more collaborative organizational structures and work processes.

New Executive Officescapes: Moving from Private Offices to Open Environments (142kb PDF)
There's a growing trend toward executives leaving their private enclaves to be closer to the action, to their customers, and to each other. They want to be able to communicate more easily and make decisions more quickly. They're also looking for more egalitarian work environments that reflect the goals and cultures of their organizations. Several top executives share their experiences about making the move from private offices to open or common areas, and tell you why the tradeoffs are worth it. Along with other industry experts, they also offer sound advice to others who may be considering a move into the open.

Office Alternatives: Working On-Site (108kb PDF)
The economic realities of the 90s have forced businesses to reassess and make fundamental changes in the way they structure their organizations. In this report, Herman Miller's Advanced Applications Group looks at how new ways of working affect corporate facility design and answers some frequently asked questions about supporting on-site work in a time of continual change.

Office Alternatives: Telecommuting—Working Off-Site (226kb PDF)
Emerging technologies and the challenges of a global economy make corporate telecommuting programs increasingly practical and attractive. How is off-site work changing the way that business thinks about office facilities? What happens to telecommuters' productivity, health, and well-being when they set up shop far from management's watchful eye? Herman Miller's Advanced Applications Group explores these and related issues in a special report on telecommuting and the workplace.

Workplace Trends in Law Firms (485kb PDF)
In a profession built on precedence, change occurs at a measured pace. Recently, however, law firms in North America have experienced increasing pressure to change more quickly. As a result, law firms are dealing with many workplace issues. They must be progressive enough to attract new business yet sufficiently stable to reassure clients. They are often faced with the challenge of managing mergers with other firms. They wrestle with how to embrace different ways of working to give clients greater value. They wonder how to control costs while still attracting and keeping good people. They are concerned that the benefits of technology outweigh its costs and fears about security. The ways law firms address these issues shape how they conceive, construct, and furnish their facilities.

Equal Opportunity Facilities: Designing for Universal Accommodation (176kb PDF)
Supporting people at work is the obvious and admirable goal of facility design. But several developments in recent years have complicated formerly assumed notions of who working people are, what they look like, and what their bodies can do.

COLLABORATION AND PRIVACY >

Beyond Four Walls and a Door: Understanding Privacy in the Office (293kb PDF)
When people need privacy to do their work and don’t get it, they report significantly lower productivity and job satisfaction compared to those who say they have the privacy they need. Conventional wisdom suggests enclosed offices would address the issue, but this ignores research that indicates floor-to-ceiling walls and a closable door don’t necessarily translate into privacy. In one study, people defined privacy primarily by the ability to own a “territory.” According to an office consultant, “High-quality work settings allow people to control contacts and to have a choice about when and how much interaction they have with others.”

It's a Matter of Balance: New Understandings of Open Plan Acoustics (200kb PDF)
It's been thirty years now. Thirty years since the first open-plan work spaces started replacing individual enclosed offices as a standard in the American workplace. Thirty years of progressively more compact workstations in progressively more densely populated work areas. Thirty years of office workers (as many as one in four, according to a recent British survey) variously complaining about the acoustics in their workstations.

Making Teamwork Work: Designing Spaces that Support Collaborative Efforts (69kb PDF)
"'Teams' and 'struggle' are two words I hear a lot," say a researcher who has listened to managers, facility planners, and team members from a number of types of companies talk about their efforts to promote and support collaborative work. Despite the benefits that teamwork promises to business organizations determined to improve productivity, quality, and worker commitment, many appear to struggle with the implementation of more collaborative organizational structures and work processes.

New Executive Officescapes: Moving from Private Offices to Open Environments (142kb PDF)
There's a growing trend toward executives leaving their private enclaves to be closer to the action, to their customers, and to each other. They want to be able to communicate more easily and make decisions more quickly. They're also looking for more egalitarian work environments that reflect the goals and cultures of their organizations. Several top executives share their experiences about making the move from private offices to open or common areas, and tell you why the tradeoffs are worth it. Along with other industry experts, they also offer sound advice to others who may be considering a move into the open.

MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES >

Lighting in the Workplace (332kb PDF)
Over the course of the century, work has shifted from physical labor to tasks that place enormous demands on a person's visual systems. Over the course of the past two decades, new technologies, demographic trends, and ways of working have intensified and complicated those demands. Designing workplace lighting that meets the needs of people who work in offices today has become correspondingly urgent and complex.

Long and Winding Road: Getting Electricity, Voice, and Data to the Desktop (237kb PDF)
When things are going right (the network's up, the power's uninterrupted, the connections are stable), office workers don't give their electronic work tools another thought. Yet for this to happen, vast lengths of cable, complex power grids, and intricate switches must all remain aligned like the sun, moon, and stars in an astrologer's auspicious reading. This report examines how power and data make their way from building source to the place where the work gets done (typically the desktop, sometimes the palmtop).

Three-Dimensional Branding: Using Space as a Medium for the Message (180kb PDF)
With a distinct brand image, companies can break free from the me-too morass that bogs down so many product and service categories, staking their claim to a firm market position competitors can't approach. While many companies look at brand building as a marketing challenge alone, others realize they have to live their brand, not just promote it. And the surest way to do that is by weaving brand building throughout the entire organization - even the office environment. Think of it as three-dimensional branding, the idea that physical space can be a critical medium for communicating the message.

It's Here Somewhere: The Effects of Storage Methods on Job Performance (177kb PDF)
Even before the advent of more paper and smaller workstations, office workers tended to either pile or file their materials. Pilers simply put stuff on any available horizontal surface, but there is often method to their apparent madness - piling keeps materials visible and accessible. Filing, on the other hand, involves setting up a system, organizing the contents, and labeling and stowing them. Retrieval includes remembering items exist and then locating them. Materials can move through stages of relevance, and be placed in active, intermediate, or archival locations. Whichever approach people take, they can use the insights presented here to increase their effectiveness in dealing with paper.

Experience of Color (717kb PDF)
Touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing—these are the ways we get our information about the world, about where we live and where we work. But the world of humans is primarily a world of sights, with 90 percent of what we know of the world coming to us through our vision.