AMS
Sales Office: Bene ViennaProject Description:
The office of the Lower Austria AMS (= Labour Market Service) in Gänserndorf was designed in accordance with a completely new customer-care and service concept.> The counter hall was turned into an open information zone and glass walls replaced the chipboard catacombs. The intention was to make service visible.
Above all, the planning and building of the new AMS office was intended to make one thing possible: to do away with red tape and create conditions under which real customer service becomes possible under efficient administration structures.
The intention was to provide the client with one single contact person who is responsible for all matters.
It was intended to make this one-stop-shop concept a reality: claims for unemployment benefits would be dealt with by the same contact person who also gives general information, or advice on questions of job mediation.
This new direction had to be taken into account in the planning, and that is why there was only one thing that mattered for the office designers: to create maximum flexibility while still adhering to all the requirements of the brief.
Compact Office implementation:
While the Gaenserndorf office was at the planning stage it was a matter of developing a spatial concept which had to meet many different requirements:
- Individual work stations should be created throughout.
- The AMS average of 15 square metres per office should not be exceeded.
- Every contact person must have his documents within easy reach.> - The corridors should be so arranged that a customer can be finished with their appointments in 15 minutes.
- The former waiting areas on the ground floor should be turned into an information zone for short-term enquiries. Advisory zones for intensive interviews should be created within the offices.
All the requirements of the brief were to be viewed from the aspect of flexibility: it had to be possible to combine rooms into interview rooms or divide them into new offices with a new office infrastructure without having to make any great investments.
Furthermore, the owners wanted to set a precedent: the building had to make the transformation from office to service centre obvious to customers, employees and neighbours. The building and the offices were to serve as a vehicle for transporting a new image.
Transparency was required.
The offices and corridors have been divided by glass walls, so that work is carried on in front of the eyes of the clients. The ideas behind this measure:
- Small offices lose their feeling of confinement.
- The working climate becomes more open for both clients and colleagues.
- The atmosphere corresponds to the exact opposite of what was expected at the former office: bright, open, encouraging.
Nobody should shy away from visiting to the AMS Gänserndorf.
Clients are greeted at an information zone which bears more resemblance to a hotel reception area than a counter hall.
By adhering to the principle of making exact appointments, waiting times become unnecessary and the previously required waiting rooms therefore become superfluous.
On the ground floor there is also a job information centre with a lecture hall, where everything needed for using modern presentation technology has been prepared by Bene.
Here too, all the furnishings were created in accordance with the principle of modifiablity.
The information centre can without any great effort be reduced in size or enlarged, preserving all the infra-structural facilities, such as telephone, PC and Intranet connection.
Customer service predominates on both the ground floor and the upper floor of the AMS.
On the basis of the new organisational scheme there are no treasured oases of internal administration, from which clients are excluded.
Clients immediately found their way within the new structures.
The accessibility of the services met with immediate acceptance.
