Office – traditionally known as a place for work, means more than just that in this modern era. Today, apart from being used for conventional office activities like reading, writing, or computer works, office is also the space for open innovative discussions, private meetings, business collaborations and a venue for office members to connect and build strong peer relationships. Certain offices even provide a space for entertainment purpose so that employees can have fun to destress from work.
Notice the connections between all the activities that can happen in the office? Each of them involves different levels and types of noise. This is when office acoustics comes into the picture.
Investing into the acoustics design of office spaces can be more important than what you may think it should be. High noise levels in the office have been one of the main complaints among employees, as it can significantly affect their work performance and productivity. Noise can come from the activities like keyboard-clicking, printing noise, or low frequency hums from office equipment like printers or computers. With high noises, conversations in the office will be difficult, such that employees will end up having to raise their voice while talking – eventually making things worse.
It is therefore imperative to focus on the office acoustics, especially for the following:
- Effective communication
Having the background noise under controlled in a office will ensure speech clarity during conversations, be it among employees, or when talking to clients.
- Employees’ wellbeing
Long exposure to high noise will cause increase in both physical and psychological stress levels among employees, leading to poorer productivity and communication. Prolonged stress can possibly cause harmful health effects, such as headache, high blood pressure, or increase in heart rate etc.
- Privacy
It is often required to have one-to-one meetings for highly confidential topics in the office, hence it is important to have spaces that offer sufficient privacy to prevent conversations cannot be overheard.
- Work performances
As mentioned in point 2 as well, noisy environments will cause interruptions during work, leading to difficulties in focusing on work. This will thus influence the employees’ wellbeing, linking back to point 2.
Now that the importance of office acoustics have been known, are there any ways to treat the noisy office environment, or even better…avoid it?
The acoustic quality of an office, or room in general, can be determined by doing reverberation time (RT) measurements. RT is defined by the time taken for reverberation to decay, where typically shorter RT is preferred for better speech intelligibility, as there will be less reverberation, or in layman terms “echo” that exists in the room. High reverberation is normally due to the hard structural surfaces that offices are built with, such as concrete, glass, plaster etc. To reduce the RT, it is recommended to install sound absorbing materials like acoustic ceilings, acoustic wall panels, thicker carpets/curtains or other similar products in the office. The absorption performances of these products can be defined by finding out the sound absorption coefficients (α) of the material, which should be already stated in the datasheets by manufacturers. Sound absorption is relatable to sound reflections of a room.
Reverberation control can then influence the speech intelligibility of a room, which can be measured as the Speech Transmission Index (STI), or speech to noise ratio (SNR). The higher the SNR or STI, the better the speech intelligibility. According to the rule of thumb, SNR should be essentially at least 10-15 dB for good speech intelligibility, which means that the speech should ideally be 10-15 dB above the background noise to be clearly heard. However, to meet the goal for privacy, it should be the other way round, where SNR should be as low as possible.
On the other hand, sound insulation, sometimes known as attenuation, associates with the sound transmission control between adjacent rooms. The purpose of having sound insulation is to achieve better privacy by effectively blocking noise travelling from one room to another. Similar to sound absorption, sound insulation of a product can be graded using a single figure rating called Sound Reduction Index (R). Sound transmission can happen when sound passes through structures like partitions/walls/floors/ceilings. Sound can also transmit through hollow elements in the building like ventilations, ducts, pipes, claddings etc. Therefore, it is important to design the interior carefully and ensure that the construction of the building is done properly to avoid any unnecessary costs for remedial work in the future.
As much as the interior aesthetic of office space should be the key of design, acoustics should not be neglected as well, because it will strongly affect the users’ experience while working or carrying out tasks in the office space. In fact, with the variety of acoustic treatment products available in today’s market, it is definitely possible for both aesthetic and acoustics to be taken care of without sacrificing either, especially when interior designers often can work with acoustic consultants nowadays. Hence, do consider to put in more effort in the soundscape design of your workspace, for the better wellbeing of both you and your fellow workmates.
REFERENCES:
https://www.barbourproductsearch.info/FIS-Acoustic-Guide-2015-file100897.pdf
https://www.workspacedesign.co.uk/
