Noise Creates Office Monsters

Julian Treasure, the Sound Master, is a sought-after and top-rated international speaker. Collectively his five TED talks on various aspects of sound and communication have been viewed an estimated 30 million times. Click to watch Julian’s quick 1:49 video, “Office Monsters,” as he relates how sound effects human behavior and describes how Armstrong Total Acoustics™ ceilings can help you provide the right combination of sound absorption and blocking to make offices a more effective place to work.

He states, “Sound affects the way we behave. At the simplest level, we want to move away from unpleasant sound, even if we’re not conscious of it. For people to work effectively and with great morale and job satisfaction, we must avoid bombarding them with noise that impedes their work, turning sociable office workers into disgruntled people and even office monsters.

You can design sound in your client spaces to be pleasing and appropriate, helping people instead of hindering them. A big part of this is making sure that unwanted sound from adjacent spaces doesn’t intrude or interfere. In every office, sound impacts behavior. People know this instinctively, which is why noise is the number one problem in modern offices. Research shows that noise, which is just unwanted sound, causes office workers to be less collaborative, less effective, and feel less fulfilled with their jobs.

Your design skills can help create auditory environments that encourage the behaviors your client’s want, not the ones they don’t. So carefully consider the type of work to be done in each space and choose materials like ceilings which will absorb sound, reducing noise levels in a space, as well as blocking sound from travelling from one workspace to another. Now, at last, we can achieve the ideal combination of sound absorption and sound blocking in one ceiling panel, changing office monsters back into effective, satisfied people.”

Julian is founder and chairman of The Sound Agency, a UK-based consultancy that asks and answers the question: “How does your brand sound?” The Sound Agency helps clients such as Harrods, Nokia, BP, Marks & Spencer, Helm Bank (Colombia), Waldorf Astoria and many major shopping malls across Europe to grow their business by optimizing the sounds they make. The agency specializes in creating effective and appropriate organic soundscapes for branded spaces.

Julian’s vision is to make the world sound beautiful, by helping individuals to make and receive sound consciously, and companies to discover that good sound is good business – which is fortunately true, as The Sound Agency has shown. TSA has installed innovative generative soundscapes in Harrods’ new Toy Kingdom (winning the Gold Audio Branding Award in 2012 for this work), made the front page of the Wall Street Journal with a crime-reducing urban soundscape in Lancaster, California, and has proved that sound can increase retail sales, customer satisfaction and brand value. The agency is now the undisputed world leader in assessing and transforming sound in shopping malls.

Would you like to improve the listening space in your office setting? Give me a call if improved employee productivity and client satisfaction are listed in your business goals this year.

Improving temperaments one space at a time!