Noise at the Office: How to Cope by Patrick J. Skerrett

Noise at the Office: How to Cope by Patrick J. Skerrett

I work for a company with an open-door policy. Open doors send an excellent message about collaboration and transparency. But they are tough on the ears and concentration. I hear the office printer and copier chug away every few minutes. Chats from the conference room and kitchen — both six paces from my door — waft in, along with ringing phones, voices in the hallway, speaker phone conversations, and other sounds of a busy publishing office. Semi-protected by three walls, and a door I can close if needed, I have it better than my colleagues who work in cubicles.

The majority of research on noise at work has focused on high levels of sound, the kind that workers are exposed to in steel mills or automobile factories. An analysis of 15 large studies showed that chronic bombardment by loud noise at work isn't good for blood pressure or the cardiovascular system. Far less work has been done on lower decibel, less-damaging office noise. The limited research, most of it done in Europe, indicates that office noise disrupts concentration, decreases productivity, and chips away at good health by increasing stress.

Noise has been a problem since as far back as people have worked in large offices. And it isn't getting better — a study from the University of California, Berkeley's Center for the Built Environment found that noise and lack of speech privacy are the biggest complaints of office workers. Adoption of the open office makes it difficult for many workers to escape sounds generated by their coworkers, while better design of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment is reducing the white noise that once masked office sounds. Green design, with its emphasis on hard surfaces and environmentally friendly insulation, is compounding the problem, says David Sykes, executive director of the Acoustic Research Center in Cambridge, Mass. Benign neglect of the Noise Control Act of 1972 since the early 1980s hasn't helped either, says Sykes.

Acoustic engineers and designers rely on an ABC algorithm to control sound:

Absorb sound with ceiling tiles, fabrics, and carpets

Block sound with walls, panels, partitions, and other barriers, and buy quiet equipment

Cover sound by masking it

If you are involved in your company's capital planning or facilities management, you may be able to help institute office-wide approaches to a quieter workplace. (To make the business case for a big project, try the return on investment calculator offered by CCR Associates, an acoustics consulting company.) For most of us, though, the best bet is to try to mask incoming sound so it isn't quite so bothersome, says Charles Hayden, research acoustic engineer for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

One colleague of mine tunes a small radio to an AM sports talk channel and keeps the volume down low. She says the babble of voices creates a sound buffer from the rest of the office. I love the sound of birds, so I often play Birdsong Radio (iTunes Radio Ambient channel) to cover up office noise.

A free, Web-based application called SimplyNoise serves up three different "colors" of sound — white, pink, and brown noise — that help obscure distracting sounds from your office mates. App developers have gotten into the game, with a slew of white noise generators for the Android, Blackberry, iPhone, and other mobile devices. Stand-alone sound devices are another option. Marketed mainly as sleep aids, these machines are perfectly appropriate for the work day, too. They range in cost from $20 to $200 or more. Some, like the Privacy Guard, can even respond to changes in your acoustic environment by automatically adding sounds and increasing the volume.

There's one more thing you can do: Don't forget that you, too, generate sounds that intrude on your coworkers. Keep your voice down, your music low, and make noise unto others as you would have them make noise unto you.