Working in an open office: how to cope with the noise

If your day is a stream of half-heard conversations, ringing phones and someone eating crisps three desks away, you are not being oversensitive. Open-plan offices are hard on concentration, and the reasons are well understood. So are a few ways to make them more bearable.

Why it is so tiring

Not all noise is equal. Constant, even sound is relatively easy to tune out. What wears you down is intelligible speech: your brain keeps processing words you are trying to ignore. In a classic study, Salamé and Baddeley (1982) found that background speech hurt short-term memory even when participants did not understand the language and were told to ignore it.

Surveys of real offices say the same. Banbury and Berry (2005) studied office workers and found that overheard speech and ringing telephones were among the most disruptive sounds. And Kim and de Dear (2013), analysing a large survey of building occupants, found that open-plan workers were less satisfied with noise and privacy than people in private offices, and that the loss of privacy outweighed any gain in communication.

Open space also does not necessarily increase collaboration. Bernstein and Turban (2018) studied two companies that moved to open plans and found that face-to-face interaction fell substantially, while email use rose. People protect themselves by withdrawing.

So the problem is real, and it is mostly structural. You will not fix it alone, but you can do a lot.

Choose your spot, if you can

Sit away from traffic: kitchen, printers, doors and meeting rooms generate the most movement and chatter.
Put your back to a wall or a partition if you can. Seeing less movement behind you reduces the pull on your attention too.
Use the quiet rooms for the two or three hours a day when you need real depth, and leave the open area for collaborative tasks and email.

Mask, don’t fight

You cannot silence a room, but you can make speech less intelligible. A steady, speechless sound blends the gaps between words, which is what makes them distracting.

Rain works well: broad, continuous, without melody. Keep it soft enough that you stop noticing it after a couple of minutes.
A storm has more weight and covers more, useful on loud days. Keep the thunder low.
A river gives a deep constant rush with a lower pitch.

Avoid anything with lyrics, which brings back the problem you are trying to escape. Music without words can work for repetitive tasks, but for reading and writing a steady wash is calmer. Why this works is explained in why rain sounds help you focus, and brown, pink and white noise compared goes deeper into the differences.

Mind the volume. Playing sound loud enough to fight a loud room, for hours, through headphones, is hard on your ears. A moderate level that blurs voices is enough. If you still hear them clearly, a better pair of closed or noise-cancelling headphones will help more than a higher volume.

Make it visible

Headphones are a social signal: “I’m concentrating.” Some teams go further with simple agreements, and they do not need a policy:

A do-not-disturb sign or status (a coloured card, a calendar block, a chat status).
Focus hours once or twice a day with no meetings and no drop-ins.
A phone rule: calls in the booths or the corridor, not at the desk.

These cost nothing, and they are easier to propose as a team experiment (“let’s try it for two weeks”) than as a complaint.

Protect yourself between bursts

A noisy day drains you in a way you may not notice until late afternoon. Small breaks do more than pushing through:

Take a five-minute reset away from your desk; we describe one in stress at work: a five-minute reset.
Eat lunch somewhere else, ideally outside.
Schedule your hardest task for the quietest hour, often early morning or after most people have left.

If you find that noise leaves you irritable, anxious or unable to sleep over weeks, it is worth mentioning to your employer or a health professional. This article is general information, not medical advice.

Where Cocon fits

Cocon draws Rain on your Mac desktop, behind your windows, with sound that follows the same intensity slider. It will not replace good headphones, but it gives you a steady layer under the room, and a calm scene to rest your eyes on between two paragraphs. Storm and River are there for louder days.

Sources

Salamé, P. & Baddeley, A. (1982). Disruption of short-term memory by unattended speech: implications for the structure of working memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21(2), 150–164.
Banbury, S. P. & Berry, D. C. (2005). Office noise and employee concentration: Identifying causes of disruption and potential improvements. Ergonomics, 48(1), 25–37.
Kim, J. & de Dear, R. (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 36, 18–26.
Bernstein, E. S. & Turban, S. (2018). The impact of the “open” workspace on human collaboration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 373(1753), 20170239.