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Fighting the ‘Tyranny of the Urgent’ with Sound Masking

April 29, 2010 By

“The Tyranny of the Urgent” was a small pamphlet written by Charles Hummel in 1967. In it, Hummel talks about all the “urgent” things in your life crowding out the “important” things. A current example would be emails and phone calls taking away from quality time with your family because the emails and phone calls are “in your face” and needing to be accomplished right now, while family bonding is something that is important to you, but is not actively vying for your attention.

It can similarly be applied in an office setting. Distractions from coworkers, phone calls, and  unnecessary or extraneous paperwork  could all be examples of ways that urgent things crowd out important things, i.e. actually getting some work done. It can make your workers feel frustrated because they feel like they are constantly busy, but not actually getting much accomplished.  If you, as a manager, can find a way to cut down on some of the urgent things that your employees encounter then you free them up to do the important work.  Not all urgent matters can be cut out–you still have to take phone calls and paperwork still has to be done. However, one way you can cut down on urgent crowding out the important is through the use of sound masking to decrease conversational distraction. According to an American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) study, workers in offices with even small acoustic treatments:

  • Were 48% more focused on their work
  • 51% less distracted, resulting in
  • 10% fewer errors and a
  • 27% decrease in worker stress

By using sound masking effectively, you can filter out the urgent things that are taking away from the important task of working and finishing projects. Fight the tyranny of the urgent with sound masking!

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Boardroom Confidentiality

April 28, 2010 By

Just because it's vast doesn't mean the boardroom can't be personal and confidential.

When most people think of a boardroom, they picture Donald Trump and “The Apprentice.”  They can feel the tension and the importance of the decisions made, but it’s hard to visualize what essentials must go into a successful boardroom.  And ever since the Hewlett- Packard boardroom scandal of 2006, the topic of boardroom essentials has solidified into two major components:

  1. Trust
  2. Confidentiality

Trust

Members of the board must feel like they are valued and respected.  Part of being respected is feeling like you can say what you need to without feeling like it’s going to be repeated in the wrong context- or repeated at all.

Confidentiality

Thus, trust is closely linked to confidentiality.  Members of the board must be sure that what is said is guarded inside the boardroom.

How to supply trust and confidentiality

Establishing confidentiality in the boardroom starts with establishing the right context.

  • The Chairman of the Board needs to set the mood.  It is wise for the Chairman of the Board to model respect and trust while also verbally setting the expected and necessary standard for the rest of the board.
  • Members of the board should be instructed to leave their opinions and their statements about a discussion, debate, or hot topic within the confines of the boardroom, unless specifically directed otherwise.  Speaking out of turn, especially to the media, often leads to paralyzing set-backs and false accusations.
  • It may be beneficial to assign the role of spokesperson to one board member who can be trusted to carefully articulate the consensus of the entire board.
  • Sound masking- the use of  white noise literally covers sound to render it unintelligible, thereby keeping what is said private.  You can achieve “confidential” levels of privacy (as measured by the Privacy Index) through the installation of speakers that emit low-level white noise directly from the ceiling tiles.

Safeguarding Your Boardroom

Boardroom confidentiality hinges on several factors: trust and confidential privacy.  It’s crucial to ensure that each member can speak his or her mind freely and confidentially.

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Sound Masking for Call Centers

April 22, 2010 By

Noise Problems for Call Centers

Most businesses thrive on customer satisfaction.  Call centers are no exceptions.  Whether they’re trying to sell a product, answer questions, or solicit donations, call centers still need to provide a professional and personal call experience for their customers.  Unfortunately, call centers suffer from many sound problems that do not allow for successful business practices:

  • Background sound, including other call reps making their calls, can make a customer feel like a number instead of a person.
  • This ambient noise can be distracting for both the customer and the caller.
  • Similarly, this background noise can make a potential customer feel as if his personal information is up for grabs for anyone.

Noise Solutions for Call Centers

As a result, as you plan a call center or seek to resolve the common noise problems therein, here a few things you should consider:

  • Separate your callers if possible so that they are not crammed together as they make calls.
  • Look into partitions or sound-absorbing panels to lessen ambient sound.
  • Some companies offer headsets that help the callers focus on the customers and not the noise around them.
  • Finally, consider sound masking, which aides both the caller and the customer because both can hear the other person and not the craziness in the call center itself.

The goal of a call center is to get current or potential customers or donors to stay on the line, listen attentively, and be heard themselves.  This kind of interaction is only possible if the customer feels like an individual and that their personal and financial information can be given without fear of it being spread beyond the intended hearer.  If you consider these factors as you plan your call center, your chances for success are exponentially higher.

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Sound Masking for Realtors

April 21, 2010 By

The problems of a real estate office

The McCord Real Estate Team

My mother and father are very successful realtors in Dallas, Texas.  My mom got her license first in 1997 and began working in a real estate office.  She quickly abandoned that office in favor of a home office because of office noise.  There were a number of issues at hand:

  • Distraction- too much office noise was distracting while she tried to work or make calls
  • Overheard Personal Information- she didn’t want other agents or passers-by to overhear her personal information as she made calls
  • Competing agents- there were times that the agent on the other side of a deal she was negotiating was present in the office.  The last thing she wanted was for that agent to hear her confirming a seller’s bottom price or a buyer’s top price
  • Lack of professionalism- similar to distraction, ambient office noise in the background does not sound personal and professional to a client on the other end of a call or in a meeting at the office

So, for the above reasons, my mom left the office and set up her own home office.  Fortunately, she has the discipline to treat her home office as an office and still be professional.  However, this is not the case for many, nor is working from home even a possibility for most.

Sound Masking for Realtors

A better solution for most would be the addition of a sound masking system within the office building itself.  Many systems are installed directly in the ceiling tiles themselves and the speakers emit white noise.  This low-level background noise covers distracting sounds and also provides privacy and confidentiality for all parties involved.

The result is that real estate agents can work productively in their offices, and their clients can get the best representation possible.  That’s an investment worth making.

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What Sound Masking Can’t Do

April 16, 2010 By

Obviously we here at Office Sound Masking are all about office sound masking. However, when considering whether sound masking is right for your space and situation, you do need to know that it has some limitations. Its not magic.

Here are some of the things sound masking can’t do.

  • Sound masking  does not mean sound cancellation.You will still be able to hear noises, especially loud noises. You will still be able to hear that a nearby conversation is going on, but you probably won’t be able to distinguish what is actually being said.
  • Sound masking does not absorb noise. For that you would need special ceiling tiles or acoustic wall panels.
  • Sound masking does not block noise. That is done by physical structures, i.e. walls, partitions, windows, etc.
  • Sound masking will not make all your employees get along. They may however, get along better, since they (hopefully) will not be interacting as much due to not being so distracted by each other.
  • Sound masking will not stop ALL distractions. The internet and cell phones will still exist after your sound masking system has been installed.
  • Sound masking will not do your paperwork for you. However, it will make it easier for you to do it, as you will not have as many conversational distractions to keep you from focusing.
  • Sound masking will not make your coffee for you. You’re on your own for that one.

What sound masking will do for you

Sound masking is used to cover noise. It “fills in” the sound spectrum around you with barely noticeable “unstructured” noise (“structured” noise would be noiese such as someone speaking or music that have patterns and convey information). Your brain will tune out unstructured noise as it searches for the structured variety. Studies have shown that offices with even small acoustical treatments (i.e. sound masking)

  • Were 48% more focused on their work
  • 51% less distracted, resulting in
  • 10% fewer errors and a
  • 27% decrease in worker stress

So while there are some things that sound masking can’t do (like make your coffee) that is a LOT that it can do. What could sound masking do for your company and its employees?

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Great Scott! Becoming a Better Manager

April 13, 2010 By

World's Best Boss...questionable, at best.

Fly on the Wall

When you watch shows like the Office, it’s easy to figure out what went wrong: management.  I think we can all agree that Michael Scott is the world’s worst manager, regardless of show ratings.  If you had to describe his managerial style, it could be summed up in one word: distracting.

However, when you step back and try to figure out how to maximize productivity amongst your workers, it might be tempting to place the blame elsewhere….anywhere but management (because management is first person).  Take a look at a recent description of the modern work place by Jason Friedman of 37 Signals:

What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

And there you have it- more distraction.  Maybe it’s not you.  Whew.  Wait- there’s more:

And managers are the biggest problem because their whole world is built around interruption. That’s what they do. Management means interrupting. Hey, what’s going on? How’s this going? Let me call a meeting because that’s what I do all day, I call meetings. And so, managers are the real problems here and that’s got to change too.

Yikes.  That’s a real bummer.  Without meaning to be, you have become Michael Scott.

How can you un-MichaelScott?

Take a day or two or three, even a week, and survey the situation.  Is what Friedman said true?  Do your workers feel distracted all day?  Do your meetings feel pointless?  Even if you disagree, public perception is king.  If your workers feel interrupted and that their time has been wasted, they will be frustrated about it and, obviously, less productive.

Remedy the situation.

  • Rework your office space so that people aren’t crammed next to each other.
  • Institute a “quiet time” like IBM and Intel did.  It’s just time to work on projects and be free from distraction.
  • Minimize conversational and other noise-related distractions with sound masking, which provides a quieter, less stressful, more peaceful work environment.
  • Streamline the tech devices you use- consider instituting a Campfire system, or something akin to what Friedman suggested, that enables workers to ignore nonessential interruptions and keep working until there’s a natural break.

Whatever you do, don’t let yourself off too easily- you are the manager and ultimately the one responsible for the bottom line.  Be creative and help you workers to work.

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Managing Office Noise

April 7, 2010 By

Disengaged Employees

Whether your employees are less engaged and therefore less productive and more prone to making errors or your clients leave feeling harried and less than impressed, office noise is a problem no matter how you look at it.

You can’t control a crowd outside the building or even the crowd inside the building (your work force), but you can be proactive in managing these distractions.  Rather than coming down with an iron fist or moving the entire staff, why don’t you try subtler techniques, such as sound masking.

How does sound masking work?

Essentially, sound masking is the super-version of white noise.  The idea is the same- white noise (employed by sound masking) is a combination of sound from all different frequencies.  The result is that your brain can’t focus on one specific (unwanted, distracting) noise and is able to be more engaged on work.

The happy results

It may sound too good to be true, but as the following improvements show, sound masking works.  With the addition of low-level background noise, employees had the following positive results:

  • Focus: the ability of office workers to focus on their tasks improved by 48%
  • Distractions: “conversational distractions” decreased by 51%
  • Error-rates: performance of standard “information-worker” tasks (measured in terms of accuracy [error-rates] and short-term memory) improved by 10%
  • Stress: when measured in terms of the actual physical symptoms of stress, stress was reduced by 27%

It’s hard to argue with better focus, fewer distractions and mistakes, as well as lower stress.

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Continuing the Auditory Distractions Discussion

April 5, 2010 By

Last Monday we looked at a couple points that Justin Mardex made in a paper he wrote entitled Auditory, visual, and physical distractions in the workplace. Today we are going to continue to look at some more of what Mr. Mardex found in his research about auditory distractions.

Sound masking helps your workers to not even hear their coworkers conversations so they can continue to work in peace.

Mardex looked first at at noise level and how that affects a worker. The study he mentioned, which was done by Keillberg and Landstrom, was about the “relationship between noise, distraction, and annoyance.”  They found that there was a correlation between high levels of noise and annoyance, but not distraction. However, predictability was highly correlated with distraction (i.e. the less predictable the noise, the more distracted you are by it.)

Which leads into the next subject, noise variability. Mardex quotes another study which found that “habituating to consistent noise is easier than to variable noise: consequently constant noise is less annoying overall than variable noise. Therefore a sound with consistent qualities…would be much easier to acclimate to than to noise which that was in some way dynamic.”

In another section of his paper, Mardex looks at the differences between speech and other types of noise. He found that there are colleagues, computers, and other types of office equipment are listed as three of the most problematic office noise disturbances. With colleagues, the problem was with conversations, namely the “information content of their speech.”  They also found that “speech intelligibility is at the center of how disturbing a speech related noise is.” In other words, if you can’t understand what is being said, you are not as distracted by it.  With office equipment, the variability of the noise was the problem. For example, the loudness of the paper shredder or the copy machine.

Sound masking could be of benefit in all of the instances mentioned above. Not only is it a constant noise with no variability, it is not loud enough to be annoying, while maintaining a gentle hum loud enough to cover up conversations and other office noise.  The result is an overall reduction in the amount of distractions a worker is subjected to. As we saw last Friday, most workers just want a quiet place to work. Sound masking can go a long way toward creating an environment where people can focus on their work.

How do you think sound masking could help in your office?

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