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Ducks in a Row: Managing Buzz

by Miki Saxon

http://www.flickr.com/photos/debaird/9612032/No, not the buzz of social media, but the buzz in open office environments.
These days companies spend both time and money creating and managing the buzz of social networks—more every year—with varying degrees of success.

But only the most perceptive are recognizing the need to manage the noise level, especially of conversations, whether on cell phones or between colleagues, in open office environments.

“The noisemakers aren’t so bothered by the lack of privacy, but most people are not happy, and designers are finally starting to pay attention to the problem.” –John Goins

Studies have proved over and over that human brains can’t multitask and that doing so reduces competency on all tasks; of even more concern is reduced productivity.

Researchers at Finland’s Institute of Occupational Health have studied precisely how far those conversations carry and analyzed their effect on the unwilling listener: a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work.

Most people actually tune out conversation-blocking background noise like music for focus-intensive work such as writing, but conversations are a different matter.

Noise is not conducive to creativity.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

Autodesk got the message and installed what is known as a pink-noise system in its Massachusetts offices.

Pink-noise provides a soft whooshing over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices.

To test its validity they turned it off after three months and the complaints poured in.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

Whether your company recognizes the problem or not, there are many things that you can do in your area to avoid noise-related productivity loss.

The first is to make sure that you are not part of the problem, because you will change no one else’s actions with a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach.

Next, talk to your team; find the problems and work together to alleviate them as opposed to assigning blame to a few gabby colleagues.

Flickr image credit: debaird™

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