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?

A Cornell study found the following to be true (emphasis mine):

The environmental psychologists found that the workers in the noisy office experienced significantly higher levels of stress (as measured by urinary epinephrine), made 40 percent fewer attempts to solve an unsolvable puzzle and made only half as many ergonomic adjustments to their workstations as did their colleagues in quiet offices. Typing performance, however, was not affected.

With a cut-throat economy and the need for creative solutions, now is not the time to increase stress, while simultaneously decreasing the ability to problem-solve and make needed adjustments to one’s workspace.  If you need your employees just to type, then you don’t need to worry about acoustic treatments, so that’s good news.  Otherwise, you might want to consider making acoustic adjustments so your employees can make the adjustments necessary to get their work done.  Interestingly, the same study reported (emphasis mine):

“In terms of practice, our findings are potentially important, because if worker motivation is lower under open-office noise because of its uncontrollability, various design options could be adopted. For example, when concentration is required, workers might use a quiet, enclosed room or sound-making devices that they would control. These kinds of measures might help alleviate the harmful effects of open-office noise on workers.”

There are a variety of sound masking units and systems currently available on the market.  Some can be installed office-wide and others can be installed for individual use and adjustment.  Either way, sound masking is a relatively simple and cost effective measure to take for you and your employees to get the most out of each work day.

What do you think of when you hear the word noise?  Here are a few online definitions of "noise:"

Noise (noun): noiz

• sound of any kind (especially unintelligible or dissonant sound); "he enjoyed the street noises"; "they heard indistinct noises of people talking …
• the auditory experience of sound that lacks musical quality; sound that is a disagreeable auditory experience; "modern music is just noise to me"
• electrical or acoustic activity that can disturb communication
• a loud outcry of protest or complaint; "the announcement of the election recount caused a lot of noise"; "whatever it was he didn’t like it and he was going to let them know by making as loud a noise as he could"
• incomprehensibility resulting from irrelevant information or meaningless facts or remarks; "all the noise in his speech concealed the fact that he didn’t have anything to say"
• make noise: emit a noise
• randomness: the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan
• any unwanted sound and in both analog and digital electronics, noise is an unwanted random addition to a wanted signal. 

It’s interesting that noise actually is a neutral term- it really is just a sound of any kind.  Yet, the first connotation most people have when they think of noise is that of being irritated or distracted by it.  That’sbecause most people associate noise with not being able to relax or concentrate.  So, whether it’s trying to fall asleep or attempting to be productive at work, noise is not a friendly interruption.  In fact, the average worker finds herself distracted more than 2 hours a day.  In a tough economy 2 hours day per worker is not a welcome sacrifice for any business. 

Sound masking

Your company doesn’t have to lose productivity to distractions in the work place.  A simple and easy solution is sound masking.  You can’t rid your office of distracting noise, but you can cover it with a low-level background sound similar to white noise.  By camoflaging irritating and distracting noise, you and your employees can reclaim those lost hours of unprodictivity. 

If the average worker is distracted, it usually takes almost half an hour to get back to his work or task.  At least there aren’t that many distractions, right?  Wrong.  Today’s employees feel frazzled by how often they are interrupted by co-workers’ conversations, phone calls, machinery noise, and slamming doors.  In fact, the average worker loses more than two hours of his work day as a result of such unwanted distractions. 

Sound masking is the new “silence” 

It’s not that your employees actually need silence even.  Rather it’s that they need a work environment conducive to concentration and cohesive thought.   Sound masking provides that by cancelling unwelcome distractions with a uniform, not to mention pleasant, sound.  Plus, our pre-tuned technology is designed for easy installation and no maintenance.   

You simply can’t afford to have your employees distracted by everyday occurrences such as these.  Contact us to find out more about what you can afford for your employees’ productivity.

There’s a reason dating a co-worker is frowned upon in most work places- it’s not that you don’t want your employees to experience a great relationship with someone in your office, it’s that you don’t want them constantly distracted when they should be working. 

Along the same lines, modern technology in open offices presents similar distractions.  Rather than concentrating on their work and meeting their deadlines, most employees find it challenging to keep their mind on the task at hand.  As soon as they do begin to focus, someone’s phone rings or the workers three cubicles down congregate to share a laugh about the weekend’s antics.  Who could ignore that?

Tuning it out

You’ve probably figured out that you can hardly ask, much less force, your employees to tune out noisy distractions.  But you can help them not become distracted by them in the first place by implementing a sound masking system.  Instead of random and sharp distractions, a sound masking system delivers a uniform and peaceful background hum that enables workers to…well, work.  And who could pass that up?