Insights · Workplace

Offices didn't get noisier. We got used to things being quieter.

Walk into any commercial office today and the sound is roughly what it always was. The same keyboards, the same phones, the same air conditioning, the same number of people talking to each other. If anything, open plan densities have come down a little and the piped-in music has mostly gone. On any objective measure, the modern office isn't louder than it used to be.

And yet complaints about sound in the office have gone through the roof. Acoustic treatment used to be a niche specification item. Now facilities managers, HR and workplace designers all have opinions about it, from wall panels to office desk screens. Something has changed. It's just not what most people assume.

The office didn't change. The baseline did.

For months on end, millions of people worked from home. Not from a purpose-built home office in most cases. From a spare bedroom, a kitchen table, a sofa with the cat on one end. The background sound of that environment isn't silence. It's a fridge, a boiler, the occasional delivery van, the neighbour's dog. What it isn't, almost ever, is twelve other people on phone calls within earshot.

The return to the office wasn't a snap back. It was a slow drift, with hybrid patterns settling in and a lot of people never quite coming back to five days a week.

In that long interim, both the people still going in and the people working from home got used to a quieter working environment. By the time everyone was in the room together again, the collective sense of what a normal day sounds like had quietly reset.

This is one of those shifts that never snapped back. The big supermarket down the road isn't 24 hours any more. The late-night train timetable is thinner than it was. Nobody really decided any of this. We just got used to it, and used to it became the new normal. Office sound belongs on the same list.

When people walk into the office now, they aren't hearing something louder than before. They're hearing something their ears stopped being calibrated for. The lighting feels harsher, the air feels drier and the sound, which they previously tuned out without thinking, is suddenly something they notice every minute of every day.

The work got harder to do in noise.

The second shift is less talked about but arguably more important. The nature of computer-based work has changed.

Not so long ago, a large share of office work was data entry, data processing and routine communication. Typing up the hundredth mortgage application of the month doesn't require deep concentration. It requires accuracy, consistency and stamina. You can do it with a radio on. Many people did.

The same chair, the same desk, the same computer are now far more likely to be hosting a completely different type of cognitive work. Drafting strategy. Writing code. Editing a podcast script. Building a financial model. Reviewing a contract. Producing anything original. This work is analytical and creative, and it's demanding in a way that routine processing never was.

Creative and analytical thinking shares a single requirement: unbroken attention. A partially overheard conversation from two desks away doesn't just annoy you. It actively recruits your brain's language processing system away from what you were trying to do. You can't choose to ignore speech. Your brain has to process it to know whether to ignore it. That cost was always there. It just didn't matter when the work was mortgage applications.

The office hasn't got louder. The work going on inside it has become far more sensitive to sound.

When the work is this sensitive to sound, a busy floor quietly costs a team in output and in errors. That is what a loud office does to its people's work.

We have become more expressive about our senses.

There's a third shift, and it runs underneath the other two. As a society we have become much more willing to say out loud that our physical environment affects how we feel and how we perform.

Nobody thinks it's eccentric any more to want good natural light in an office. Nobody thinks it's eccentric to expect air that doesn't smell. Nobody thinks it's eccentric to want somewhere decent to eat lunch, or chairs that don't cause back pain after four hours. We experience the world through our senses, sight, smell, taste, touch and sound, and for four of those five, the modern workplace has quietly been catching up for years.

Sound is the one that got left behind. Ask a facilities manager what the lighting budget is. Ask about the coffee machine. Ask about the chairs. Then ask what the acoustic treatment budget looks like, and in most buildings there isn't one, because acoustics was never historically treated as part of the environment. It was something you only dealt with if there was a specific complaint.

The shift happening now is that acoustics is joining the other senses. It's becoming a design parameter rather than an afterthought. The same way nobody now builds a new office without thinking about lighting design, fewer and fewer are being signed off without thinking about how the space sounds.

We just got round to noticing the office was never designed for how we work, or who we are, now.

What this means in practice

If you're a dealer, specifier or facilities manager, the thing to notice is that the conversation has changed shape. People aren't asking for acoustic treatment because the office got louder. They're asking for it because they have realised it was missing, and now that they have noticed, they can't unnotice it.

That has a few practical consequences.

The complaints are coming from people who didn't used to complain. Heads-down knowledge workers. Senior staff. Anyone whose output depends on thinking clearly for extended periods. These aren't people you can brush off with a pair of headphones and an etiquette guide for the team chat.

The solutions have to look good. If acoustics is being brought in alongside lighting, planting and workplace design, it has to sit in the same design language. A panel that looks like an afterthought won't cut it any more. This is why you're seeing acoustic products that function as part of the aesthetic, colour, pattern, form, all treated as design decisions rather than afterthoughts. It's the same reason nobody specifies the cheapest fluorescent strip light any more.

And the specification has to be proportionate to the problem. You don't need to acoustically treat the whole ceiling to make a difference. What you need is enough coverage, in the right places, to bring the room's reverberation time down to a level where speech becomes less intrusive. Get that right and the complaints tend to ease. Get it wrong and you have spent money without solving the problem.

If you want the practical version, room by room, our guide to office acoustics sets out what to treat first and what each product does.

Where office desk screens help, and where they don't.

Start at the desk. Office desk screens give each person a defined space and take the busy floor out of their eyeline. If you can't see the busy room, it isn't on your mind. Brackets are sold separately.

Then the room. Wall panels on the hard surfaces and ceiling rafts over the busiest desks soak up some of the sound that bounces around, so voices carry less far.

Here's the honest bit. A desk screen won't block a voice, and a panel won't stop sound going through a wall. They make the room easier to work in. They don't make it silent, and we'd rather say so before you buy.

Sound is the fifth sense of the workplace.

None of this is really about decibels. The measurements matter for the specification, but the thing driving the market is something more human. People spend a third of their waking lives in these rooms. They want the rooms to feel good. Good light, good air, good furniture, good food and, finally, good sound.

The office didn't get louder. We just got round to noticing it was never designed for how we work, or who we are, now.

Felted supplies PET felt acoustic products to dealers, specifiers and end clients across the UK. Find out more at felted.uk.