Good acoustics in the office? You bet!

Open-plan offices: blessing or curse?

Since the 1990s, open-plan offices have gone from being the latest business trend to becoming the norm. Separate offices are no longer cost-effective and open office spaces have been shown to encourage more social interaction and creativity among employees. Communication between people is easier and more transparent, which helps give the company a definite dynamic. These days, you’ll find eight out of ten employees work in an open-plan office. Trouble is, more than 75% of them don’t like the general hubbub and background noise these offices create. Yet having separate offices is not an option: in fact a totally quiet workspace is not good for productivity, because there’s less pressure to get individual tasks finished. This means that it is extremely important to create an open office space that benefits from pleasant acoustics.

The right product in the right place

Invite an acoustics expert such as COUST to come along to examine the situation in your office. We’ll take the necessarynoise readings and then suggest which of our products and solutions are right for your situation. We will install ceiling panels (see COUSTceiling) above the office island spaces to take away that annoying extraneous noise. Then there’s the option of placing desk screens between desks and desk islands (see COUSTdeskscreen), as well as standalone screens (COUSTscreens) for optimising speaking privacy. That way, you can make phone calls again without disturbing your colleagues and you won’t be distracted by your fellow employees chatting around the coffee machine.
 

Sounds like you?
Are you looking for a professional partner to tackle the problems with the acoustics in your office? If you are, then contact us – obligation-free – by giving us a call or using the contact form.

See some of our installations for companies here.