Office Acoustics – A Guide to Increased Productivity
Working in a cacophonous office is no easy task. It is distracting, tiring, limits privacy, and often leaves you with a headache at the end of the day. These effects add up to productivity dropping up to 66 percent. Fortunately, it does not have to be this way. These office acoustic headaches can be easily remedied with acoustic panels and proper soundproofing techniques.
Office spaces with well-designed acoustics increase productivity, reduce fatigue and stress, make conversing with coworkers and clients more manageable, and increase privacy throughout the office.
We put together this article to show you how to resolve many of the worst offenders when it comes to office acoustics with simple, easy-to-implement solutions utilizing acoustic panels.
Here are the topics covered in this article. Please reach out if you have any questions.
1. Conference room acoustics
Poor speech intelligibility, loud volumes, and difficulty with conference and video calls are some of the most common issues plaguing conference rooms. Far and away, we receive more calls regarding conference rooms than any other office space.
Modern conference rooms often feature hard finished floors, drywall walls, glass windows, and hard reflective ceilings. All of these add up to an abundance of echoes and long RT60 (reverb time – see chart below). In a room where several people are meeting, the aim is to hear more of the direct sound (the sound coming from one’s mouth or a speaker) than the reflected sound (sound bouncing off the walls, ceiling, floor).
Conference rooms made up of reflective surfaces result in an improper balance of direct and reflected sound, making conversing in person difficult, and utilizing tele/video communication nearly impossible.
To solve the most prevalent acoustic concerns in conference rooms, acoustic panels, and other soft, absorbent materials such as fabric window treatments or carpeting are the best options.
The most popular solution is the use of Low-Profile Acoustic Panels placed along the ceiling. At only 1 ½” deep they are discreet, have a small footprint, and are perfectly suited to absorbing sound in the speech range.
We do recommend treating both the walls and the ceiling of your office for the best results. The more evenly distributed acoustic treatment is in a room, the more effective and efficient it will be. You can anticipate achieving better results and needing fewer panels when treating multiple walls and the ceilings versus treating just the ceiling or a single wall.
2. Open offices and co-working spaces
What is increasing employee productivity by 66 percent worth to your company? Studies conducted by speech and communication expert Julian Treasure have shown that productivity in noisy distracting work environments decreases productivity by an unbelievable 66 percent.
When most people think of the positive aspects of open office layouts, ideas like increased collaboration, improved communication, and relationship-building interactions come to mind. When people who work in open offices describe their workspace, realities like distracting, fatiguing, isolating, and lacking in privacy are often voiced.
Potential advantages of open offices:
Improved communication
Increased face-to-face interactions
Stronger relationships between coworkers
Reduced construction cost
Efficient use of space
Disadvantages of noisy open offices:
Constant noise and visual distractions
Lack of privacy
A decrease in face-to-face interactions
Fatigue
Loss of motivation
Need for noise-canceling headphones
This is not to say that open offices cannot work well or take full advantage of their many potential positives. What it does mean is that thoughtful planning and acoustic considerations are vital to making open offices productive, inspiring, and engaging places to work.
The benefits of quality acoustics in an open office setting can be invaluable, and the solutions are straightforward and cost-effective.
Start in the planning and design stage. Everything from the wall, ceiling, and floor materials to the lighting and furniture will have a considerable impact on the acoustics of space.
Layout desks and workers in configurations that will result in the least amount of noise and distractions. Desk partitions limiting direct visual line of sight to other workers is crucial in limiting both sound and visual distractions.
Place acoustic panels on the ceilings and walls as needed to reduce reflections, RT60, and noise. Acoustic panel locations will be different for each open office layout.
Implement sound-masking systems to improve privacy and reduce distracting noises. However, this will only be effective after the space has been acoustically treated (more on that below).
Employing the right strategies for improving the acoustics in your open office can foster greater productivity, improve worker satisfaction, and enable you to realize the benefits of an open office space fully. Reach out to us to get started.
3. Office suites
You wouldn’t take a business call in the bathroom. With hard finished floors, reflective walls, and ceilings, that is precisely what most office suites end up sounding like.
So, what do you do to combat the noise echoing around your office, making it hard to focus, carry on a conversation, or, worst of all, making your clients think you are working from the bathroom? Acoustic panels. Installing acoustic treatments on the walls and ceiling (or just the ceiling when the walls are not an option) can immediately make drastic improvements to the acoustic quality of an office.
We commonly treat office suites with four to eight 4’x2’ Low Profile Acoustic Panels. The shape, size, materials, and furniture in an office all impact how many panels are needed. If you aren’t sure how many you will need for your office, email us.
4. Home offices
2020 threw a lot of curveballs our way, and as a result, the home office/classroom has exploded. All of a sudden, the sound of kids playing, dinner cooking in the kitchen, lawnmowers cutting down tall grass, and a whole slew of other sounds is in the background of your Zoom calls.
Making the switch from your office to the spare nook, bedroom, or closet introduces a whole new set of potential sound concerns. Home office acoustics can be treated just like office suites, as discussed above.
Four to Eight Low Profile Acoustic Panels on the ceiling and walls in your home office will take your echoey distracting work environment and turn it into a productive, fulfilling office.
Soundproofing home offices, in addition to taming the acoustics, can make a massive impact on your productivity. Few homes are built to have interior soundproof walls, but here are the four areas that will have the most significant effect and the most bang for your buck:
1. If you are lucky enough to have a door, make sure it seals tightly, all the way around when closed (weather stripping and an automatic door bottom).
2. Replace hollow core doors with solid wood slab doors.
3. Whenever possible, chose a location on the top story of your home. Reducing impact noise (e.g., footsteps, toys hitting the ground) from going through the floor to the room below is nearly impossible without installing carpet or significant construction. Working from the top floor eliminates this issue.
4. Use a white noise or sound masking machine to drown out distracting background noises.
*Only do this at very low volumes—less than 50dBA.
Sound masking
Sound masking or noise masking, as it is commonly referred to, is the use of amplified background noise to drown out or block other noises to reduce distractions and increase privacy. These systems generally employ several speakers to blanket a space in low-volume filtered white noise (specifically to the frequency range of speech).
Where does sound masking succeed?
Open office spaces
Hallways (improving the privacy of adjacent offices)
Coworking spaces
Where does sound masking fail?
Conference rooms
Office suites
Offices that have not already been acoustically treated
Sound masking an open office
The use of sound masking in open office spaces can be an instrumental tool. But, if used without proper acoustic treatment, it will introduce more problems than it will solve. When you introduce more noise to an office space with hard reflective surfaces, there is nothing to absorb the energy and help the sound dissipate quickly.
This forces employees to talk even louder and further exacerbate the problems you are trying to solve. While sound masking is a vital part of making open offices productive work environments, it is crucial to implement them in conjunction with acoustic treatment.
This chart to the left shows the ideal background noise (click on the image to enlarge it) for open office spaces is 42 to 52dBA. If a sound masking system is installed before acoustic treatments, the system will need to be set to a volume around 70dBA before having any beneficial masking effect. We’ve seen this repeatedly in offices, and the result is an office that is even more distracting, fatiguing, and frustrating to work in.
Hallways (increasing privacy)
One of the advantages of sound masking is its ability to improve privacy throughout an office building. For example, if you have several offices along a hallway, you may not want people to be able to hear conversations from one office to another. Implementing sound masking in the hallway can drown out the speech and significantly improve the privacy of each adjacent office.
Conference rooms
Sound masking in conference rooms rarely works for several reasons. Sound masking does not improve speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility is improved by increasing the direct sound heard from a source (e.g., person, speakerphone) and decreasing the reflected sound (e.g., echo, reverb). This requires utilizing acoustic panels or other absorbent materials. Additionally, most speakerphones, webcams, and similar conference call solutions have built-in echo reduction to improve clarity for those on the other end of the line. The background noise generated by sound masking systems limits the echo reduction capability of these devices, making call clarity even worse.
Office suites and home offices
The paragraph above on conference rooms applies to offices and home offices as well. The one caveat is that sound masking can be used here to reduce the effect of distracting noises from adjacent rooms if the office is not soundproofed well.
Tips for sound-proofing and isolation
Why is soundproofing important in an office?
Confidentiality for both you and your clients.
Creating a distraction-free environment.
Providing a place to develop ideas and unique viewpoints.
Soundproofing and isolation differ significantly from treating the acoustics of a space. Isolation refers to preventing the transmission of sound through a barrier (e.g., wall, ceiling, floor, door, window), while the acoustics of a space refers to the sound within that space.
Soundproofing and isolation are challenging, expensive, and can only be accomplished through proper construction. Acoustic panels work incredibly well to treat the acoustics of a space, but they will NOT help with soundproofing. If you are in an existing building, here are some common improvements to note for your office isolation:
Identify and treat all sound leaks (any space where sound can leak from the room)
Shared A/C ductwork
Glass or hollow core doors
Doors that do not seal tightly on all four sides when closed
Windows that are not sealed along the entire perimeter
Open spaces between the walls and ceiling (even if they are above dropped ceilings)
For office buildings in the design phase, identifying where isolation and soundproofing will be most critical is an essential part of the process. Soundproofing is accomplished primarily through the use of specific wall, floor, and ceiling construction methods.
Identify the required amount of isolation for the office units
Determine best isolation methods and materials based on STC and IIC
This can include HVAC requirements, outlet isolation, floating floors and ceilings, isolation clips and resilient channel, double-wall construction, door, and window options, and more deepening on the application