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White Noise Restores Energy at Work

October 18, 2011 By

Do you often feel completely drained before you reach the end of the day and struggle to finish your work on time? While you should look into medical reasons for low energy, sometimes the culprit is hidden in plain sight. Try these tips to reduce the amount of energy that is wasted by normally office situations and recover some of your lost productivity.

Try Using White Noise – It takes a great deal of energy and effort to concentrate in the midst of distractions and noise.  Most people lose up to two hours a day from interruptions and distractions at work. But a personal sound machine can help by covering unrelated conversations and surrounding office noise. Better yet would be office-wide sound masking that would benefit everyone. This will allow you to work with focused energy.

Limit Your Energy-Draining Tasks. Are you aware of specific tasks or certain people who drain you of energy and motivation faster than your normal work? Be deliberate about how you approach these tasks or people in your work day. Find the least stressful time of day for you, when you are not hungry or especially tired, and spend only 10 or 15 minutes dealing with this work.

Upgrade to Ergonomic Tools.  Ergonomic products are specifically designed to encourage a natural,  ergonomic posture where your muscles are at their lowest strain and and work is minimized. Start with a supportive, ergonomic chair that helps maintain good posture for long periods of time. With any chair, make sure your back has good support;  try adding portable lumbar support if your chair doesn’t provide enough.

Drink More Water.  If you wait until you feel thirsty, you are already dehydrated. Because our bodies and brains are made up largely of water; even slight dehydration of less than 5% decreases our energy and productivity by more than 20%. A good place to start is with the general rule of daily drinking at least eight glasses of water.

Everyday we are bombarded with  distractions, interruptions and physical discomfort that quickly, and unnecessarily,  drains our energy and breaks our concentration. Consider using white noise to cover the office noise that continually interrupts you. And upgrade to a good ergonomic chair to improve your posture and relieve some of the energy-draining pain. Adjusting your office environment and habits can make a huge impact on your energy and productivity.

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How Environment Affects Work

October 23, 2010 By

As an office manager or person in charge, you want your workers to be at their best and to be productive through out the day. If you were able to make a few changes to increase productivity and worker satisfaction would you do it? Of course you would. The following are a few ways to tweak the work environment to make it more conducive to working for everyone.

While all the windows are great, these workers proximity to each other can make working a challenge.

  • The temperature – Too hot and you have people falling asleep and getting cranky (not to mention smelly!). Too cold and it gets difficult to move your fingers properly when typing and can make it hard to focus. Finding a happy medium might be difficult, but as long as the temps are not one extreme or another, people can adapt by bringing a sweater to work or wearing a short sleeved shirt.
  • The quality of light — Is the office dim? Is there adequate task lighting at each desk so people are not struggling to read?
  • Proximity to others — It is easier to concentrate if each person has their own space to work in. However, its not usually possible to give everyone their own individual office. Is is possible to arrange the desks so that people are not too close to each other? Perhaps line the desks up around the room so their backs are to each other while working or install some partitions to divide up the space.
  • Noise level — Its hard to concentrate in a noisy environment. It can also affect customer service because of it being difficult to hear people on the phone. Not to mention that if everyone is talking to each other, that probably means that not a whole lot of work is getting done. Sound masking is an effective solution to this problem. The white noise allows the brain to tune out all of the other conversational distractions and thus makes one less likely to join in a conversation that they can’t clearly hear.
  • Air quality — If the quality of the air is poor in the building you are in for some reason it can actually make people sick, which means loss of productivity. Ask someone to check the building’s air filter and then go from there to figure out the reason for the air pollution.
  • The environment of the work place — This category includes the color of the office, how furniture is arranged, how many windows there are, etc. While you may not be able to tear down walls and add windows, you can think about how things are being used and then adjust accordingly. For instance, if most of the people needing the copy machine are on one side of the building and the copy machine is on the opposite side, it might be a better use of space to move the copy machine closer to where it is needed. Another consideration is the color of the walls — cool colors (blues and greens) tend to be calming and soothing colors and warmer colors (oranges and reds) tend to be exciting colors. Perhaps you could check with a professional decorator for some tips on the color of the office environment.

Are there any changes that you can think of that might help your workforce?

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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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Managing the Informational Bottleneck

March 23, 2010 By

In the 1950s, studies found that  humans possess an “informational bottleneck”- basically the idea that the human mind can only take in so much information at a time under good conditions. Even less information is taken in and processed when distracted.

However, recent studies have shown that there are ways to “manage the effects of the informational bottleneck”. One of those ways is to “manage attention so that unwanted stimuli do not crowd the working memory.” The unwanted stimuli is distractions in general.

How does this apply to me?

You are probably thinking at this point, “What does all of this have to do with increasing my workers’ productivity?” Quite simply, it is relevant because further studies about this have found that “distraction during learning can be harmful, even if the distraction doesn’t seem to injure [the subjects'] immediate performance on their tasks.” They found that people stored the information in different parts of their brains based on whether they were learning it with or without distractions. When undistracted, the subjects showed “flexibility” with the information.  They were “more likely to be able to draw analogies and extrapolate from it.”  So not only were they remembering what they learned, but they were  also taking that information and using it in new ways. It boils down to the fewer distractions a person is encountering, the better able they are able to take in information, remember it, and then use it.

Sadly, the average worker gets distracted more than 70 times a day, with the majority of these being conversational distractions. If you are able to minimize those distractions, that will help your workers to be able to take in the information they need and be able to use it effectively, such as remembering ideas and information better and (hopefully) synthesizing those in an effective way that perhaps no one has thought of before.  That can only help your business.

Obviously you cannot control all the distractions in the work place. You can, however, help to mitigate the conversational distractions that your workers experience with sound masking. People working in environments with sound masking were 48% more focused on their work and 51% less distracted, which resulted in 10% fewer errors. (Perhaps because they were storing the information in their brain in such a way that allowed them to be able to use it effectively!) Sound masking is a way to help your workers not only work better and with less stress, but to be able to use the information they have gained to develop new and dynamic ways of doing things.

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Being Proactive

March 15, 2010 By

In today’s difficult economy it is important that you take a proactive approach to your company’s profit margin. Not only are there fewer dollars to go around these days, but it is increasingly competitive to obtain those dollars. You have to continually be proactive and think of new ways to shrink your bottom line and to make a profit.

This is definitely NOT what you want to see in your office!

One way is to better utilize the resources you already have—your workers. The average American worker is distracted more than 2 hours a day, with conversational distraction ranking right after internet usage. That is 2 wasted hours that you are paying for that you are not getting anything in return. Instead of starting an office task force to nag your workers into what they are supposed to be doing, why not take a proactive, but less invasive approach–sound masking.

By masking the source of the distractions, you enable your workers to be more productive without adding unnecessary stress to their work environment. Studies have shown that sound masking increased a worker’s ability to focus on tasks by up to 48% and eliminated distractions (especially conversational distractions) by up to 51%.  With even minor adjustments in the office sound environment a substantial increase in performance and productivity can be seen. 

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No time to work, got a table hockey game to play

January 19, 2010 By

On a scale from 1-10, how engaged do you think your employees are on a normal work day?

On a scale from 1-10, how engaged do you think your workers are?

“I get so easily distracted at work that I lose focus and can’t concentrate. I actually welcome the distractions because I would rather play than work! It’s a good thing that I am unemployed. I have no work to be distracted from!”  (taken from a real blog!)

While most people won’t celebrate unemployment in this economy, most probably would agree that distraction at work is not only common, it’s your worst enemy.  Businesses like yours lost an estimated $700 billion in 2008 as a result of distractions, conversational distractions the biggest contributor.

Sadly, distractions are part and parcel to working collaboratively in a multiple-office work space and certainly among the cubicle farm.  However, distractions don’t have to be as devastating as hundreds of billions of dollars a year.  In fact, as a manager you can simply forbid your employees to speak or disconnect any phone that rings.  Just kidding.  Just like distraction, noise is also a part of every office- it simply needs to be managed.  Many businesses opt to install office-wide sound masking systems to help cover intrusive distractions.

Instead of forcing your employees to cope on their own (such as googling “distracted at work” or using headphones to drone out interruptions, both of which ironically further distract said worker ), take this serious problem into your own hands.  In this economy, every dollar counts- there really isn’t time to play table hockey.

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The economy stinks…get over it.

December 17, 2009 By

If your business is struggling, you’re not alone.  Many companies are laying off up to a third of their employees.  So, yeah, the economy stinks, but it doesn’t have to kill your business.  So, whether you have a huge or tiny work force, you need to be efficient because it’s the efficient companies that thrive. Here is one way to look at being efficient as it interplays with being effective:

"Efficient" is defined as working without waste or using a minimum of time, effort and expense. But, the definition is silent about the goals of the operation. A person can be very efficient at what they are doing but still not get to where they want to be because they aren’t doing the right things. That’s where "effective" comes in. "Effective" means "having the desired result". Once the desired overall result is defined, the tasks leading to the result can be isolated and these tasks can then be completed efficiently….

So, while your business’s specific goals will determine how to be effective, being efficient is a little more universal.  In fact, the average worker wastes 2 or more hours  a day because he is distracted by conversations, ringing and/or buzzing phones, and who knows what else…A loss of 2 hours per employee is not exactly efficient.  One option might be sound masking.  Most people can’t work in ceaseless clamor, but at the same time, they can’t be productive in silence either.  Sound masking is like white noise in that it provides a low-level "hum" that can help workers to tune out irritating distractions that keep them from being productive. Many companies and small businesses have found that plugging the leak of conversational distractions is more than worth the initial investment.

 

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