What Your Open-Plan Office Sounds Like to the People Working In It
It’s back to school, back to the office, and back to a full building. All summer the place ran half-empty and sounded fine. Now everyone’s in at once, and the room that felt calm in July suddenly doesn’t. Have you stopped to notice what your office actually sounds like to the people sitting in it?
Open plan design looks great, but doesn’t sound great – or encourage productivity – without careful management.
And it’s not the volume. It’s the talking.
We assume office noise is a loudness problem. Too loud, turn it down. But it isn’t. A busy floor at a steady hum is easy to work through — your brain files it as background and forgets it. One clear phone call two desks away is a different story. It barely moves the overall level, but you can’t ignore a word of it. Intelligible speech is what breaks concentration, not decibels.
Which leads to the part people find odd: a very quiet office can be the worst kind. With no background sound to cover them, every voice carries clean across the whole floor. Nobody can take a private call, and nobody can think. The colleague trying to concentrate and the colleague on a sensitive call are both undone by the same silence.
So, consider the scoundscape of your office, not just noise levels. Two offices can post the same average noise levels but feel worlds apart: one with a soft, steady background and few interruptions, the other silent until each conversation cuts straight through it. An average can’t tell those rooms apart. Measuring sound over time can.
The sector already has the guidance on sensible ranges for indoor noise in offices, and the WELL Building Standard treats background noise and speech privacy as marks of a healthy building. In schools it matters more again — students can’t learn what they cannot hear clearly — and on a hospital ward, noise is the enemy of rest and recovery.
But a standard only sets the target. It can’t tell you how the room performs once it’s full — people, HVAC, printers, notifications, a Tuesday in term time rather than an empty room on handover day. That’s the gap. A design target is a prediction. Measuring the occupied room is the proof.
That’s what an indoor monitor is for. Our AS180 Sonisens is a Class 1 instrument that sits in the space and logs the whole picture, all day — not just the average, but the background and the peaks underneath it. And it measures sound levels, not audio. It never records what anyone says. You learn exactly how the room behaves without touching anyone’s privacy.
From a feeling, to something you can point at
This is where an argument nobody can win — “it’s too noisy” / “it’s fine” — turns into something on a screen. Through Sonitus Cloud you see how the floor sounds across the day and the week: the mid-morning peak, the after-lunch lull, the meeting room whose door does nothing, the quiet zone that’s only quiet on the plan. Add baffles, bring in masking, move the loud team away from the heads-down desks — and you can see whether it worked, instead of hoping it did.
Sonitus Systems offers both the hardware and software for a range of environmental parameters on a continual basis, with real-time information available through our Sonitus Cloud dashboard. For more details on our indoor and outdoor noise and air quality monitoring products and services, please contact the team at https://www.sonitussystems.com/contact-us