If you think the buzz of your open-plan office is getting you down, you're right. As workers return to the office after lockdowns, they could be giving up a lot of their concentration too.
Key points:
- In a study, office noise raised participants' sweat response by 34 per cent
- It also found a decrease in mood, although people tried to hide their emotions
- Researchers say employers need to consider affect on concentration in office design
Libby Sanders, assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University, says the evidence shows office noise really does have an impact.
"I worked in industry before I became an academic," Dr Sanders told Christine Layton on ABC Radio Perth.
"Often I had to listen to people talking all day about what was wrong with their workplace, when they were trying to concentrate and get things done.
"I was also involved in designing offices and then looking at the effects on people.
"And there hasn't been a lot of experimental research that's really controlled things to show if this is actually a causal relationship."
The study Dr Sanders undertook, 'Open-plan office noise is stressful: multimodal stress detection in a simulated work environment', took 43 people and put the noise theory to the test in a simulated office environment.
"We had a recording of combined noises — phones, printing, people talking — to make sure everyone had the same exposure and the same level of noise," she said.
"Then we set up an environment that looked like an open-plan office and we had people doing tasks that are similar to what you would do in an office, that required concentration."
Stress rises while mood plummets
The researchers then measured the participants' physiological stress and changes in mood, as well as using artificial intelligence (AI) to try to read their mood during the exercise.
"We found a 34 per increase in sweat response, which is something you might not even notice," she said.
"It doesn't mean someone's dripping buckets of sweat at their desk, but it's a really strong indicator that you're experiencing stress.
"Over time, increased stress will have significant effects on our mental and our physical health.
"In terms of our job itself, it makes us more likely to be less satisfied, less committed to the organisation and ultimately leave."
The study also found that office noise had a negative impact on participants' mood, although the AI wasn't able to clearly pick this up.
"When they filled out the self-report, study of mood, they had a really significant results," she said.
"Their negative mood went up by 25 per cent when they are exposed to the open-plan office noise, which is really significant and obviously leads to lots of potentially negative outcomes.
"What was interesting in this study is that we showed that people were actually suppressing the emotions on their face in the AI.
"We can't assume by walking around the office and thinking that everyone looks fine that they're actually okay."
Cutting the noise levels
Dr Sanders said there were things both employees and managers could do to make cubicle life more bearable.
"If you are going to be on the phone and being noisy, maybe go away from your desk," she said.
"Don't have a stand-up meeting next to somebody's computer when they're trying to work.
"Obviously, there are things that the employer can do, like acoustic treatment, or sound masking technology."
Employers can also look at the design of the office and thinking about how crowded to make it.
Another common solution is to wear noise cancelling headphones at the desk, but they do have their downsides.
"They are effective and a lot of people do use them," Dr Sanders said.
But she said the modern equivalent of shutting your office door could make people inapproachable.
"They can reduce that interaction, the collaboration, which is an important part of the day-to-day work environment, but some people just have no choice.
"They have to put the headphones on because they literally can't think and concentrate to get their job done."
Sometimes two is a crowd
For ABC Radio Perth listener Peter, even working from home with just one colleague didn't solve the office noise issue.
He runs a training business with his wife, and they renovated their house to create a shared office space.
"But we found out very quickly, that the nature of our business being a training company, that if we had a new client, they needed specific answers." Peter said.
"And my wife took most of those calls.
"If I was sitting next to her, and I was on the phone to someone else, or typing too loudly or something like that, she found it very distracting and couldn't give the correct answers to the clients.
"We've had to move my office."
Rethinking office life post-COVID
Dr Sanders said the findings also had implications for employers that were looking to reduce the amount of office space they leased, post-COVID.
"With more people working from home, you need less people in the office on a daily basis, so a lot of companies are having a smaller floor plate.
"That means potentially, on someday, there may be more people in that office, and also that the noise might be more concentrated.
"We have to consider that this is the biggest complaint that people have about open-plan offices and we really need to be conscious about this going forward."