Like War and Peace. Polemos kei Eirini.

As true Indians, we have a problem acknowledging issues with concentration. Most of us have heard stories of real people we know who’ve come up through absolute hardship. We’re expected to concentrate like they did. In environments that are far noisier than the said reference point. This just does not work in today’s world. In this article, we will look at some typical sources of office noise, how to eliminate those, and what to do when you really cannot get rid of it.

The Sources

Traffic Noise Intrusion

Our offices are a mix of collaborative, focussed, casual unwinding and serious meeting room spaces. These are thankfully, mostly insulated from outside noise, but clearly, enough such spaces are not. Especially offices of venture capitalist companies – these tend to be small in occupying numbers by nature – these do not grow to 1000 member organizations. However, Partner’s cabins, Video Conferencing rooms, meeting rooms, Personnel Cabins, all require high levels of soundproofing due to the sensitive nature of information discussed in these rooms. Most corner offices face traffic noise intrusion from at least 1 side, if not two. Solving for quietness is essential in these rooms. Pass-by noise is intermittent, unpredictable, and can be tonal or rough sounding, and frequently causes lapses in focus. In addition, the façade elements are often placed in such a manner that their joineries are not acoustically sealed, leading to a lot of flanking noise between rooms.

In smaller offices such as these, it is good to buffer the outer zone with non-critical spaces, but that rarely happens as there usually really isn’t that kind of space. Augmenting the façade with additional glazing is the way to go in such cases.

In larger buildings, there is usually plenty of lawn areas and the office area is significantly set back from the road. The façade glass, usually a 12mm thick toughened glass, is typically enough to keep the ambient traffic noise in check and bring it down such that it is not intrusive-sounding.

Background Noise Levels

Even if the background noise levels in an office are within acceptable limits, there’s the issue of the whirring coffee machine, the printing and reprographics, and just footfall and conversational noise. Everyone knows what a call centre sounds like to the person calling the helpline. One can hear the entire floor talking at the same time, while struggling to understand the speech of the one person relevant to us, in a typical scenario.

In other scenarios, many office cultures are quiet. We have seen entire floor spans of workstations, mostly occupied, most people on headphones, taking calls in soft tones. But usually, there is a sensible upper limit on how many hours one would want to use headphones for.

Building Services Noise

The larger the office, the bigger and noisier the AHU required to feed it life sustaining air. Between the supply and the return air openings, most of the wall is open. Careful design will ensure adequate plenum spaces that allow for a peaceful expansion, and will allow for a laminar flow of the return air. An intelligent design would appropriately space quiet rooms away from the AHU rooms, after which based on the type of lining used, enough attenuation of the noise can happen over the specific distance. Duct losses must be calculated, as this tips the scales between a quiet and a noisy experience.

Even if the background noise levels in an office are within acceptable limits, there’s the issue of the whirring coffee machine, the printing and reprographics, footfalls and conversational noise.

The Solutions

Acoustical Treatment for Reverberation

The first would be to make the work areas somewhat softly padded. These are often neglected, as it is the meeting rooms that need wall panelling, but it is the people in open offices that suffer sounds of footfalls, mobiles ringing, lift dings, and wafting conversation. It makes sense to segregate the reception area from the workstations area through a glass door. Acoustical treatment ensures that the noise has some place to go get absorbed into.

Zoning

The third is to keep separate zones for focus areas and for collaborative work. Hot-desking areas where discussions can happen without disturbing focus areas would help to make people get into comfortable, even animated conversations, without worrying about having to keeping it down. Sliding glass doors help to keep the noise in while keeping the views expansive.

Focus Pods

The fourth, is to look at Focus Pods. These are individual cabins, floating around in offices. These are tiny rooms, just enough for a person to sit and take calls, maybe keep a laptop in front of them. These may or may not come with any kind of AV equipment, except maybe charging for the laptop.

These serve a triple function. First, if you really need to put your head down for half an hour and get something done, this insulates you from the road noises that may be making their way in through the façade glass, which, one rarely has control over – these are provided by the base builder and there is usually not much one can do to augment it for soundproofing, especially in rented spaces.

Second, these work to provide privacy for personal calls, and focus for meeting calls. Many of these come with fans for ventilation, and those have an additional speech masking effect.

Thirdly, these serve as permanent desks for those whose jobs involve a good amount of calls. These are clearly helpful in growing offices and in rented spaces where it is not feasible to make physical changes to the space.

Speech Masking

This is a psychoacoustic phenomenon. Our brains, in the presence of a white noise-ish background, cannot discern words very well. The same words, in the absence of the white noise source, can be heard crystal clear and understood. This a random example. The noise from the speakers is a steady-state noise that the brain quickly learns to predict and tune
out, and so it doesn’t call your attention.

While this solution works to keep people undistracted, it doesn’t make up for reverberation in a space. As long as the RT is within acceptable limits, this will work well in most scenarios.

Conclusion

To conclude, ultimately, the pressure is on the employee to tune out the noise and turn in the work for the day, but design can go a long way in making it easy for the occupants to focus on their job, turn in more within the same time, tune into higher order thinking, and finally, go home with good amounts of cognitive energy still left.

Noise can raise blood pressure, cause bodily distress, mental agitation, and loud levels can even bring out the monster in a sane person. Quietness on the other hand, leads to focus, deeper thinking, and graceful output. It is ultimately a design choice – are we engineering for quietness, or for noise.

Hot-desking areas where discussions can happen without disturbing focus areas would help to make people get into comfortable, even animated conversations, without worrying about having to keeping it down.

 

Roopa Krishnamurthy, an acoustical consultant based out of Bangalore is an electronics engineer with a post graduate degree in Audio Acoustics from the University of Salford, UK. She has worked through her 11 year old company Soundscape India on projects ranging from speech intelligibility predictions, standards compliance, reverberation treatment and building noise control.

She prides herself on using local material which helps save her clients significant amounts of time and cost. Roopa has undertaken projects in the educational, commercial, hospitality, corporate and residential industry, and in specialized studios and customized, audiophile-grade home theatres.

Understanding the importance of silence as much as audio, Roopa believes that a quiet workplace can be conducive to concentration. She writes on typical sources of office noise, how to eliminate them, and what to do when you really cannot get rid of them.