Open Office Noise and Productivity: What the Research Shows

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Open-plan offices now account for the majority of commercial workspace across most developed economies. The design logic is straightforward: lower partition walls, reduce construction cost, and create an environment that encourages spontaneous communication. Yet since the early 2000s, a growing body of peer-reviewed research has examined whether open plans deliver on that promise — or whether the acoustic cost outweighs the collaboration benefit.

This review summarises findings from published research on office noise, cognitive performance, and acoustic design. It is intended to help workplace planners, HR managers, and facilities teams make evidence-informed decisions about office layout and acoustic investment.

The rise of open-plan offices

Open-plan office design became mainstream in the 1960s, partly inspired by the German Bürolandschaft (office landscape) movement, which placed staff at all levels in one shared space to encourage more horizontal communication. By the 1990s, the layout had merged with cost pressures — removing permanent walls reduced both construction and real estate spend per head.

By the 2010s, technology companies had made open-plan offices a cultural signal of collaboration, transparency, and creative energy. The physical format — long shared tables, minimal private offices, visible leadership — became associated with fast-moving, non-hierarchical organisations.

The assumption embedded in this design is that proximity produces collaboration, and that collaboration produces better outcomes. Research has since examined whether both assumptions hold.

What the research shows about noise and concentration

The most consistent finding across independent studies is that noise is the primary complaint in open-plan offices, and that it meaningfully degrades performance on tasks requiring concentration.

A large-scale study by Kim and de Dear (2013), published in the *Journal of Environmental Psychology*, surveyed over 42,764 respondents across 303 US office environments using BOSTI Associates' post-occupancy data. The study found that open-plan workers reported significantly worse scores on noise levels, privacy, and ease of interaction than those in enclosed private offices. Crucially, any communication benefits gained from the open layout were statistically outweighed by the costs of noise and privacy loss.

Banbury and Berry (2005), writing in *Ergonomics*, reviewed a series of controlled studies on irrelevant background speech and its effect on serial recall, reading comprehension, and writing performance. Their findings showed that intelligible speech — the kind produced by nearby colleagues on calls or in conversation — is substantially more disruptive to cognitive performance than unintelligible noise at the same volume. This is because the brain automatically processes language, even when the listener is trying to ignore it.

The implication for open offices is significant: the sounds most commonly generated in a shared office (conversations, phone calls, video meetings) are precisely those most likely to impair the concentration of workers nearby.

Cognitive cost of workplace interruption

Noise does not only reduce performance while it is present — it also disrupts workflow in ways that persist after the noise stops.

Gloria Mark and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, studied knowledge workers over extended periods using direct observation. Their 2008 study, presented at the ACM CHI conference, found that after an interruption, workers took an average of 23 minutes to return to their original task. During the intervening period, they typically picked up two other tasks before returning to the original one.

The mechanism is not simply distraction. Interruptions require workers to offload working memory, restart cognitive processes, and re-establish context. The more cognitively demanding the original task — analytical work, writing, coding, strategic planning — the higher the cost of each interruption.

In an open-plan office, the frequency of acoustic interruption is structurally higher than in enclosed spaces. Workers who cannot control their acoustic environment therefore pay this productivity cost more often throughout the working day.

The collaboration question

The primary rationale for open-plan design is that removing barriers increases collaboration. This assumption deserves direct scrutiny.

Bernstein and Turban (2018) conducted two studies of companies transitioning to open-plan offices, measuring actual interaction patterns using sociometric badges and electronic communication data before and after the transition. Their findings, published in the *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B*, showed that open-plan offices reduced face-to-face interaction by approximately 70% compared to pre-transition levels. Electronic communication (email and messaging) increased by 22–50% to compensate.

The researchers proposed that employees in open-plan offices respond to reduced acoustic and visual privacy by withdrawing from unplanned interaction — wearing headphones, avoiding eye contact, and substituting digital communication for in-person conversation. The open plan, in this analysis, produces the opposite of its intended effect.

This does not mean open plans offer no collaboration benefit. For teams doing highly creative, iterative work — such as design studios, editorial teams, or product teams in early development stages — the informal communication that open layouts enable can be genuinely useful. The research suggests the issue is more nuanced than a single layout serving all work modes equally.

Health and wellbeing effects

Beyond task performance, research has examined whether office acoustic environments affect employee wellbeing and absenteeism.

Bodin Danielsson and Bodin (2008), in a study published in *Environment and Behavior*, analysed data from 469 Swedish office workers across seven different office types — from private offices to flex offices and open-plan environments. They found that workers in open-plan offices reported significantly lower satisfaction with their physical work environment and showed higher rates of short-term sick leave compared to those in private or small shared offices.

Haapakangas and colleagues (2008), researching Finnish office environments, found that perceived acoustic quality was among the strongest predictors of self-reported work performance and wellbeing — stronger than lighting, temperature, and air quality in their dataset. Workers who rated their acoustic environment as poor were more likely to report concentration difficulties, fatigue, and stress.

These findings align with research in environmental psychology showing that perceived control over one's environment is a significant factor in stress and performance. In an open-plan office, most workers cannot control the acoustic input they receive — a condition that contributes to chronic low-level stress over time.

What acoustic design can do

The research does not suggest that open-plan offices should be abandoned — it suggests that acoustic design must be treated as a core component of the layout, not an afterthought.

Workplace acoustic interventions fall into three broad categories:

Sound absorption reduces the amount of noise that reflects and propagates around an open space. Acoustic ceiling tiles, soft furnishings, carpeting, and wall panels all contribute to absorption. This reduces overall ambient noise but does not eliminate the intelligibility of nearby speech.

Sound masking introduces a continuous, low-level background signal (typically in the 45–50 dB range and tuned to the frequency range of human speech) that reduces the intelligibility of conversations without increasing perceived loudness. Research cited in the *Journal of the Acoustical Society of America* shows that effective sound masking can significantly reduce the radius of distraction in open offices — the distance at which a neighbouring conversation is intelligible.

Acoustic enclosure provides the highest level of speech privacy and concentration protection by physically separating workers from the acoustic environment around them. This can take the form of private offices, enclosed meeting rooms, or purpose-built acoustic pods placed within an open-plan floor.

The most effective workplace acoustic strategies combine all three: absorption to reduce overall noise levels, masking to reduce speech intelligibility at distance, and enclosed spaces for tasks requiring the highest levels of concentration or privacy.

The case for designated quiet and private zones

One of the clearest recommendations to emerge from workplace research is the need for differentiated acoustic zones — areas designed for different work modes rather than a single homogeneous layout.

A 2019 review of office acoustic research by Oseland and Hodsman, published in the *Journal of Corporate Real Estate*, found that organisations reporting the highest levels of employee satisfaction with their workplace environment consistently offered workers a choice of settings: open collaborative areas, quiet zones for focused work, and enclosed spaces for private communication.

This "activity-based" model accepts that different tasks have fundamentally different acoustic requirements. A brainstorming session benefits from an open, informal environment. A client negotiation requires privacy. A complex analytical task requires freedom from interruption. Designing for one mode at the expense of others imposes a cost on the tasks the layout does not serve.

For many organisations, the practical question is not whether to have an open-plan office, but how to add enclosed or semi-enclosed spaces within an existing open layout without the disruption and cost of permanent construction.

Acoustic pods as a workplace solution

Purpose-built acoustic pods have emerged as one response to this problem. They are freestanding, enclosed workspaces designed to be placed inside an existing open office, providing a quieter and more private area without structural renovation.

Acoustic pods vary significantly in their performance. Manufacturers often publish noise reduction figures, but the measurement methodology matters: self-reported figures, laboratory STC ratings, and independently certified field measurements can yield very different numbers for comparable products. Buyers evaluating pods on acoustic performance should ask for the measurement standard and testing body, not only the headline number.

When well-specified and correctly placed, acoustic pods allow organisations to add enclosed work settings incrementally — positioning them where noise or privacy problems are most acute, and relocating them as the office layout evolves.

Summary of key research findings

References

Banbury, S. P., & Berry, D. C. (2005). Office noise and employee concentration: Identifying causes of disruption and potential improvements. *Ergonomics*, 48(1–2), 25–37.

Bernstein, E. S., & Turban, S. (2018). The impact of the 'open' workspace on human collaboration. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*, 373(1753), 20170239.

Bodin Danielsson, C., & Bodin, L. (2008). Office type in relation to health, well-being, and job satisfaction among employees. *Environment and Behavior*, 40(5), 636–668.

Haapakangas, A., Helenius, R., Keskinen, E., & Hongisto, V. (2008). Perceived acoustic environment, work performance and well-being — survey results from Finnish offices. *Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on Noise as a Public Health Problem* (ICBEN), Foxwoods, CT.

Kim, J., & de Dear, R. (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. *Journal of Environmental Psychology*, 36, 18–26.

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. *Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems* (CHI '08), 107–110.

Oseland, N., & Hodsman, P. (2019). A psychoacoustical approach to resolving office noise distraction. *Journal of Corporate Real Estate*, 21(1), 37–52.