The Key to Healthier Employees Could be a Quieter – or Louder – Office Space
hubie writes:
A new study suggests that too much - or too little - office noise has a negative effect on employee well-being. The sweet spot? About 50 decibels, comparable to moderate rain or birdsong.
Choosing to work in the murmur of a busy coffee shop rather than in an office with library-level silence might be healthier, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Arizona and University of Kansas.
The study finds - perhaps unsurprisingly - that loud noises at the office have a negative impact on employee well-being. But the study also suggests that complete silence is not conducive to a healthy workplace.
[...] "Everybody knows that loud noise is stressful, and, in fact, extremely loud noise is harmful to your ear," said study co-author Esther Sternberg, director of the UArizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing & Performance. "But what was new about this is that with even low levels of sound - less than 50 decibels - the stress response is higher."
[...] Humans' tendency to get distracted, Sternberg said, is a result of the brain's stress response to potential threats. Our brains are "difference detectors" that take note of sudden changes in sounds so we can decide to fight or flee, she said.
That may explain why low, steady sounds help mask distractions in the workplace, she added.
"People are always working in coffee shops - those are not quiet spaces. But the reason you can concentrate there is because the sounds all merge to become background noise," Sternberg said. "It masks sound that might be distracting. If you hear a pin drop when it's very, very quiet, it will distract you from what you're doing."
Journal Reference:
Karthik Srinivasan, Faiz Currim, Casey M. Lindberg, et al., Discovery of associative patterns between workplace sound level and physiological wellbeing using wearable devices and empirical Bayes modeling [open], npj Digital Medicine (2023) 6:5 ; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-022-00727-1
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