Noise in the office
Introduce specified communication tools for the internal communication within the company. Microsoft teams, WhatsApp, Outlook, and Slack are often used for these purposes.
Try one of the above or look for the many other alternatives on the market. These tools can not only heighten your internal communication processes, but also help to reduce the talk and chitchat at the office.
In the end, you can still choose to have the chat over the coffee – but only when you want to :) This leads to our next step…
It’s not always easy to work in a company with multiple, different cultural values. Most international companies share this hurdle. We recommend making basic office rules which include respecting everyones privacy.
While having established rules, it can still be difficult to enforce them and keep the noise down. That’s where nudging comes in. Nudge your colleagues with posters.
You can also add dividers between each desk to reduce the talk with your neighbor. Basically, make it less convenient for people to speak to the person next to him or her.
During Covid companies started to allow working from home. Many still allow it which helps to avoid crowded office spaces that in return create quiet surroundings.
But what if you made it a regular thing? Consider introducing working-from-home-days for certain parts of your company on specific days. For example, in a company with 100 employees, 20 people work from home Mondays and the next day 20 different people do same. As a bonus, you may even get higher efficiency employees.
You tried every step above and the noise is still killing your productivity? Time to bring out the big guns: design and build a new office space. One way is setting up new soundproof walls with engineered designs.
In this regard, consider the time spent and the quality of materials. Gypsum combined with rockwool inside is fairly cheap and quick to set up. It helps to absorb sound better than concrete or harder materials but is also easy and quick to be taken down again, for example in the case of moving to another office.
Building small rooms for meeting, general discussion, phone calls and personal space is a great way to divert conversations to specific rooms, reduce talk and noise in the open office spaces.
Most importantly, as mentioned earlier, these newly build rooms/walls will act as sound barriers and seek to contain sounds but also absorb some of it.
Change office space. No joke.
As mentioned, when defining the office, the amount of employees per square meter is important. Take into consideration whether you have been outgrowing your current office space. You can do all the above steps, but at some point, there will be too many people in too little space.
Good luck with combating the noise at your workplace!
