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COGNITIVE
The third effect of sound is on our ability to think, with dramatic effects
on our productivity or effectiveness. This mainly because we have quite
limited neural bandwidth when it comes to processing sound.
I have never met anyone who can understand 2 people speaking at the
same time. Scouring the available scientific evidence, I have calculated
that we have auditory bandwidth for around 1.6 human conversations.
This feels about right intuitively; most of us know the feelings of
overwhelm, frustration and maybe irritation that arise when 2 people are
talking at us simultaneously, or when we’re trying to work on a deadline
and someone near us is talking loudly.
As you may have noticed, we have no earlids, so unless you don
headphones there is no way of shutting out distracting sound. In
addition, we are programmed to decode language so a nearby
conversation takes up one of our precious 1.6 bandwidth, leaving us only
0.6 to listen to the internal voice we use when we’re trying to work with
words, symbols or numbers. That’s why another person’s conversation is
the most distracting sound of all.
Research on people working in modern open-plan offices has revealed
that variable or unpredictable sounds are the most distracting, especially
when we have no control over them. After unwanted conversation, the
most commonly cited nuisances are ringing phones and office machinery
like printers or other people’s computers. This kind of noise degrades our
ability to think, often dramatically: productivity can be reduced by two
thirds in noisy open-plan offices! One survey of 1,800 home and office
workers in the UK found that they were losing up to 2 hours a day to
interruptions from noise, mainly from loud colleagues and ringing
phones. The estimated cost to the UK economy was £139 billion a year!
Office expert Professor Jeremy Myerson has written extensively on this
issue. He points out that we have different work modes, and that open-
plan suits only one of them – collaboration, or team-based working,
where the main objective is fast communication so it’s acceptable to
interrupt neighbours without warning. When I interviewed him for a BBC
Radio documentary on this topic, Myerson noted that this kind of
working open-plan is like frontier territory in its lack of social rules. As he
said: “The postman doesn’t enter your house unannounced and dump the
post on your living room floor, but that’s exactly what happens in open-
plan offices.”
Alert sounds in any environment are particularly disturbing – after all,
beeps and buzzes were designed to grab our attention. If an alert sounds
in communal space, it alarms not only the person it was intended for, but
also everyone else in earshot. This is a major problem in hospitals, where
the constant racket coming from beeping machinery has created a
phenomenon called ‘alarm fatigue’: staff become habituated to the noise
and cease to register the alarms. This doesn’t mean the noise has no
effect: the unfortunate patients are also subjected to all these warning
sounds, with serious consequences for sleep and stress levels, as we’ll see
later in this chapter.
So, noise can interrupt collaborative working, as well as being bad for the
health. A more profound issue, though, is that 4 critical work modes are
simply not catered to at all in many open-plan offices.
The first is concentration, or individual working, which requires a space
more like a library. Noise distraction and lack of quiet working space are
among the top complaints on the Leesman Index, which has surveyed
hundreds of thousands of office workers about what factors affect their
productivity.
Tip: If you have an alert sound set for incoming email, your concentration will be
broken every time it chimes, which may be many times an hour. Try instead turning
off the alert sound and checking your email in batches at defined times, maybe on
the hour every hour for 5 or 10 minutes, or first and last thing each day. You may
find you become up to 3 times as productive!
The second is contemplation, or not working, which might be
decompressing after some intense work or maybe gently sharing ideas in
a social setting. The first of these is best done in a calming, Zen-type
room, while the second requires informal, social spaces (isolated, of
course from quiet working areas!).
The third is communication over distance, which often requires privacy. I
have come across offices so quiet that the turning of a piece of paper is a
major event. In these places there is no privacy at all, so one person
making a call disturbs everyone else in the room – not to mention the
uncomfortable, intimidated feeling that arises when you realise everyone
is listening to your call!
The fourth is conferencing, or structured meetings in groups. Again,
privacy is a major issue here: I have experienced many offices where
meeting spaces have no walls, or maybe a token fabric partition, which
means the sound of the meeting distracts the people working nearby, who
can hear every word - and of course the sound of a lively open-plan office
makes the meeting more challenging to hear. Meeting rooms need good
acoustics and effective attenuation to stop sound travelling out to and in
from adjoining spaces.
You have probably had many of these experiences yourself in offices that
were designed purely for the eyes. Now that you know the importance of
sound, you can take care to move to the most appropriate environment
for the kind of work you want to do.
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