Interior plantscaping: a winter service for office clients

Landscaping is a seasonal business, and German social law takes this into account. Employees of businesses affected by seasonal loss of work are, subject to further conditions, entitled to seasonal short-time allowance in the period from December 1 to March 31 (§ 101 SGB III). A separate ordinance makes clear that landscaping is included: it expressly lists landscaping businesses that carry out work such as building gardens, parks and green spaces (§ 1 para. 4 Baubetriebe-Verordnung).

The industry itself helps fund this system. The winter employment levy for landscaping businesses amounts to 1.85 percent (WinterbeschV) of the gross pay of manual workers subject to the levy. The seasonal short-time allowance cushions a loss of work, but it does not replace a job. As a rule, an hour of work spent at a client's office in January is worth more to a business than a well-cushioned loss of hours in the yard.

Interior plantscaping does not depend on the weather. The plants stand in heated rooms, the care visit happens in sleet just as it does in July, and routes can be planned weeks ahead. Even so, the title of this article calls it a winter service only with a caveat: a care contract for office plants runs all year. Its strength in winter is that it keeps running during the months when little happens outdoors, and that it keeps skilled staff in the business who will be needed again in spring anyway. On top of that, winter is when site visits for new indoor jobs fit into the calendar.

For the website, this sets a clear order. The interior plantscaping page should go online in the fall, when many companies plan the year ahead and offices are refitted after moves or renovations. How such a topic plan spreads across the year is shown on the page on seasonal planning for your website, and the other jobs for the quiet season are covered in winter topics for your website.

Hardly any figure is quoted as often in connection with office plants as this one: plants in a previously bare office increased productivity by 15 percent (University of Exeter 2014). It comes from research by Marlon Nieuwenhuis (Cardiff University), Craig Knight (University of Exeter), Tom Postmes (University of Groningen) and Alex Haslam (University of Queensland), which the University of Exeter reported on in September 2014.

Anyone who wants to use the figure should know how it came about. The researchers compared bare offices, stripped of decoration in line with the lean office idea, with offices that had plants. Three field experiments (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2014) in large offices in the Netherlands and the UK were published; two of them (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2014) ran over the following weeks and months. According to the press release, productivity was monitored over months in two large offices (University of Exeter 2014) in the UK and the Netherlands. Besides productivity, the study mainly measured how employees perceived their workplace: air quality, concentration and workplace satisfaction.

This also makes clear what the study does not show. It does not show that every office with plants becomes 15 percent more productive, and it says nothing about how many plants of which kind are needed in which place. It compared bare rooms with rooms that had plants, not an already comfortable office with an even greener one. And it dates from 2014. For context, the report also notes that an interior plantscaping company was involved in the study. That does not make the results wrong, but it belongs in the picture when a business advertises with the figure.

Even more caution is needed with a second popular argument: plants clean indoor air. A review of 12 published chamber studies with 196 experimental results (Cummings/Waring 2019) came to a sober conclusion. Removing as many volatile organic compounds from the air as a building's normal air exchange already does would take 10 to 1,000 potted plants per square meter of floor space (Cummings/Waring 2019). The title of the paper sums it up in one sentence: potted plants do not improve indoor air quality.

For the service page, this means air purification is no selling point. Anyone who advertises with it makes claims about the results to be expected from use, and untrue or deceptive claims about these make a commercial practice misleading under German law (§ 5 UWG). What can be said is what the field study actually measured, with study design and year. Other points to watch in advertising claims are summarized in the article on advertising with prices and claims.

For commercial clients, there are essentially three models, and each spreads the risk differently. Which one fits depends less on the plants than on whether the client wants to invest or pay a running rate, and on who takes care of a plant that dies despite care.

With rentals, it pays to look at the law. The lessor has to hand over the rented item in a condition fit for the agreed use and keep it in that condition during the rental period (§ 535 BGB). A company that rents out plants should therefore assume that a dead rental plant is its problem and not the client's, unless the contract validly provides otherwise. This belongs in the calculation: a rental price without a reserve for replacements is calculated too tightly. These notes are general in nature; for drafting contracts, legal advice is the right way to go.

With a purchase, it is the other way round. The plant belongs to the client, and the care contract sets out what the company owes: how often it comes, what it does and how a plant that dies despite care is handled. A clear rule in the contract helps here, such as replacement on fixed terms. When caring for existing plants, recording the starting condition is the first step, with photos and a short list for each position. How scope, frequency and term can be described cleanly in a care contract is shown in the article on offering garden maintenance contracts; the same principles apply indoors, just with different line items.

What the client gets for the money is decided in the care visit. It is the actual service, and it should be described on the page in such concrete terms that an office manager can compare it with another quote. A complete care visit includes this work:

BuGG notes that documenting the care and inspection visits by the specialist company helps everyone involved to respond quickly to possible problems (BuGG). For the company, the log is also evidence. If a plant dies because the heating was reset or a filing cabinet was moved in front of the window, the log shows what was visible at the last visit. For the office manager, it confirms that someone was there, even if nobody watched the care visit.

Pest control is a delicate point. Anyone applying plant protection products needs a certificate of competence (§ 9 PflSchG) issued by the competent authority, and certified persons must attend an approved refresher or further training course within every three years (§ 9 PflSchG). The law names exceptions, among others for products approved for non-professional users in home and allotment gardens and for simple auxiliary tasks carried out under the responsibility and supervision of a person holding a certificate of competence. A company working in a client's office should not rely on the first exception, and helpers without a certificate of their own only take on simple auxiliary tasks under the supervision of a certified person. In rooms where people work, there are good reasons anyway to treat infestations mechanically or with beneficial insects first. What the company does here belongs in the contract and, in general terms, on the service page.

A site visit takes time. So that it does not come to nothing, the form asks in advance the questions that would otherwise only be settled on site. The principles are on the page on the enquiry form for landscaping and in the article an enquiry form that qualifies. For interior plantscaping, these details help:

The last question matters more than it seems. In medical practices and law firms, care visits sensibly take place outside office hours, in offices before work starts or on a fixed weekday. Knowing this early lets the company plan its routes accordingly, and the client sees in the form itself that the company is thinking about their daily routine.