What the evidence says about taming noise in open plan offices
Somewhere in your office right now, someone is wearing noise cancelling headphones – not because they love music, but because it’s the only way they can think at work. That is the quiet verdict most teams have already delivered on open plan acoustics.
The open plan office is not going anywhere, and it should not. Collaboration, visibility and flexible space all have real value. But the standard fitout – hard ceilings, glass walls, polished concrete and long runs of desks – treats sound as an afterthought. And the people in it pay daily.
Plenty of fixes get suggested. Some work, some are decoration wearing an acoustic costume. Here’s how you can tell the difference.
Why open plan offices are so distracting
The main culprit is not volume. It’s intelligibility.
Research into open plan offices consistently finds that the most disruptive sound at work is other people’s conversations, precisely because your brain cannot ignore speech it can understand. A colleague’s phone call two desks away hijacks the language-processing part of your mind, whether you want it to or not. Studies measuring cognitive performance find clear drops in memory and focus tasks when intelligible speech is present.
Hard surfaces make this effect worse in two ways. They carry speech further, so that more people can understand more conversations from further away. And they raise the general noise floor, so that everyone speaks louder, which means noise carries further again. If your office gets louder as the day goes on, this mechanism is why.
AS/NZS 2107:2016, the Australian Standard for interior sound, recommends open plan offices sit around 40 to 45 decibels of ambient design level. Plenty of untreated fitouts run well above that level for most of the working day.
What doesn’t work to address office noise
- Asking people to be quieter. It lasts a day. The room’s acoustics – not the etiquette poster – set the volume people speak at.
- A few plants. Greenery may look lovely but it does almost nothing measurable to reverberation or speech transmission at the quantities offices use.
- Headphones as policy. They treat the symptom, isolate people, and quietly concede that the working space has failed.
- A token acoustic gesture. Two small panels in a hundred-square-metre space is decoration. Absorption works by surface area. Small areas give small results.
What actually works to improve office acoustics
Acousticians summarise it as three moves: absorb the sound, block its path, and cover what remains. Most open plan problems are solved with the first two.
Absorb at the ceiling
The ceiling is the highway that sound uses to travel across an open floor. Speech rises, reflects off the hard “lid”, and lands intelligibly thirty metres away. Calando acoustic ceiling tiles close that highway, cutting both the distance conversations carry and the overall noise build-up. In most open plan offices, the ceiling is the single highest-impact treatment available.
Absorb at the walls
Large hard walls (especially glass and plasterboard runs alongside desk banks), bounce conversations back across the floor. The Calando acoustic panel converts those surfaces into absorbers, and the Custom Calando acoustic panel does it while carrying brand graphics, values or wayfinding – which is why marketing teams often end up fans of the acoustic project! For fitouts with sustainability targets, the ECO Wall acoustic panel supports green building goals while doing the same work.
Block with dividers
Absorption lowers the sound field, but line of sight still matters, because speech travels straight. Freestanding acoustic dividers between teams, and desk dividers between facing colleagues, intercept conversation paths at exactly head height, where it counts. They also give teams a sense of territory without building walls, and they can move when the floor plan does.
Give calls somewhere to go
No open floor survives being everyone’s phone booth. Meeting rooms and quiet rooms take the loudest activity out of the shared soundscape, provided those rooms are themselves treated. A glass meeting room with no absorption simply relocates the problem and adds echo.
The hybrid work factor
Open plan acoustics used to be an internal matter. Hybrid work has changed that, because the open floor is now the backdrop of every video call your team joins from their desk.
An untreated floor sends its whole soundscape down the line. The far end hears the sales team, the kitchen conversation, and the reversing beeps from the loading dock, all captured faithfully by a laptop microphone that cannot tell colleague from client. People respond by retreating to meeting rooms for routine calls (which clogs the room booking system), or by working from home on days they would otherwise come in, which quietly undermines whatever the office was intended for.
Ceiling and wall absorption changes the equation at both ends. Calls from desks become viable again because the microphone picks up one voice instead of a floor, and the general hum drops to a level remote participants stop noticing. If your organisation is trying to make office days worth the commute, the acoustic environment is part of that offer.
Where to start with improving office acoustics
Every office is different, but the pattern that works is consistent. Measure or map the complaints first, because the loudest zone is not always where treatment belongs. Treat the ceiling over the busiest areas, add wall absorption on the major reflective runs, then place dividers where teams face each other, or where focus work sits next to collaborative work.
The scale of intervention needed is usually smaller than you might expect. Offices rarely need every surface treated. They need the right quarter of surfaces treated, and an acoustic assessment will identify exactly which quarter that is. Installation is surface mounted and typically done outside business hours, so the first your team notices is a quieter Monday.
Get practical advice on improving your open plan office acoustics
Open plan offices fail acoustically for physical reasons – and they’re fixed the same way. Absorb sound at the ceiling and walls, block the direct paths between teams, and give loud activities a treated room of their own. Skip the plants-and-posters approach, size the treatment to the space, and the office starts working the way the floor plan always promised.
Avenue Interior Systems designs acoustic solutions for Australian workplaces, backed by more than 25 years of experience through the Flexshield Group, with treatment that looks like it was part of the fitout all along.
Trusted to help shape your brand through better sound. Call us on 1300 827 177.
Because at Avenue Interior Systems, we design your silence
