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?