acoustic management in offices
So often, acoustic management gets overlooked when planning the layout of an office. It’s all too easy to get caught up in making sure a workspace has the right ‘look’, but acoustic management – the way noise travels within a room – could have the biggest impact of all. It pays to consider how much sound might reverberate, echo or reflect across your office.
why acoustic management is important
Poor acoustics can have a major impact on employees’ health. Damage can be done to hearing when a prolonged period of time is spent in an overly noisy space, and it’s been proven that excess noise has a negative impact on stress levels. That can in turn lead to higher blood pressure and a greater risk of heart problems in the long-run.
In 2022, over half of UK office workers felt ‘stressed’ by office noise. With more and more businesses espousing their commitment to workers’ wellbeing, acoustic management remains a black hole in the majority of action plans.
Noisy offices don’t pay. The idea that loud noise can be distracting is hardly revolutionary, but when it’s impacting workers’ focus and productivity, less gets done, mistakes are made and the quality of work suffers.
Aside from just being distracting, noise fundamentally makes it more difficult to hear. If multiple conversations are being had within an office at a time, and that office lacks acoustic management, employees can hardly be blamed if key information gets lost in the wave of noise.
Another key reason why it’s so important to consider acoustic management are the legal obligations businesses face. The Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005 place obligations on employers to protect their workers’ hearing by making sure that they’re not exposed to dangerous noise levels at work.
Under the regulations, employers have to assess the risks facing their employees and take action to reduce dangerous noise levels. Any issues with office acoustics have to be picked up on quickly to avoid harmful noise levels and keep employers on the right side of the regulations.
what office noise reduction solutions are out there?
Size, furnishings and layout are often the main causes of noisy offices. Open spaces with lots of hard reflective surfaces create the ideal conditions for sound to travel and reverberate. In open-plan offices in particular, where there are less barriers to prevent the travel of sound, these sorts of conditions can mean that the general hubbub of the office accumulates to become a distracting wall of noise.
There are some simple steps that specifiers or office planners can take to improve open office acoustics. Soft furnishings dampen rather than reflect noise, so it could be a smart idea to replace hard wood floors with carpeting. Dividers and screens can disrupt the travel of sound waves across an open space, but may negatively impact on the carefully curated design of a workplace.
Another option could be to think about the function of your workspace; do your workers use it more for collaboration or focused work? However, you use the space, it’s suboptimal if people are trying to get on with work while having to block out the noise of a brainstorming session taking place at the same time.
“Zoning” areas of the office for different functions could reduce disruption to an extent. But, if the fundamental acoustics of the space need improvement and sound is still able to reverberate around the room, you’re likely to keep running into the same problems.
SonaSpray: the ideal acoustic management solution
SonaSpray offers an effective noise reduction solution to create a more productive working environment without significantly impacting on design. Oscar Acoustics’ seamless range of SonaSpray products absorbs sound instead of reflecting it, minimising the reverberation time of noise and improving the acoustics of a space. As a decorative spray, SonaSpray can be applied to most substrates quickly and with minimal disruption
By facilitating quality open office acoustics where sound doesn’t drive to distraction, SonaSpray protects workers’ wellbeing and health, as well as ensuring employers don’t fall foul of noise legislation. It also means dedicated collaborative and focused work zones can be implemented to full effect, so businesses can get the full benefits of increased collaboration productivity.
Effective acoustic management can turn even busy offices into peaceful places filled with happy workers producing strong work. To find out more about how SonaSpray could help your acoustic management efforts, get in touch.
