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

Insights · Workplace

Walk into any commercial office today and the sound is roughly what it was ten years ago. 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 of the mid-2010s is mostly gone. On any objective measure, the modern office is not louder than the office of 2015.

And yet complaints about office noise have gone through the roof. Acoustic treatment, which was a niche specification item a few years ago, is now something that facilities managers, HR, and workplace designers all have opinions about. Something has changed. It is just not what most people assume.

The office didn't change. The baseline did.

For most of 2020 and into 2021, 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 is not silence. It is a fridge, a boiler, the occasional delivery van, the neighbour's dog. What it is not, almost ever, is twelve other people on phone calls within earshot.

The return to the office was not a snap back. It was a slow drift over eighteen months or more, 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 post-Covid shifts that never snapped back. Tesco Extra is not 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 are not hearing something louder than before. They are hearing something their ears stopped being calibrated for. The lighting feels harsher, the air feels drier, and the noise, 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.

Fifteen years ago, a large share of office work was data entry, data processing, and routine communication. Typing up the hundredth mortgage application of the month does not 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 is 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 does not just annoy you. It actively recruits your brain's language processing system away from what you were trying to do. You cannot choose to ignore speech. Your brain has to process it to know whether to ignore it. That cost was always there. It just did not matter when the work was mortgage applications.

The office has not got louder. The work going on inside it has become vastly more noise sensitive.

We have become more expressive about our senses.

There is 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 is eccentric any more to want good natural light in an office. Nobody thinks it is eccentric to expect air that does not smell. Nobody thinks it is eccentric to want somewhere decent to eat lunch, or chairs that do not 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 is not 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 is 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 are a dealer, specifier, or facilities manager, the thing to notice is that the conversation has changed shape. People are not asking for acoustic treatment because the office got louder. They are asking for it because they have realised it was missing, and now that they have noticed, they cannot unnotice it.

That has a few practical consequences.

The complaints are coming from people who did not used to complain. Heads-down knowledge workers. Senior staff. Anyone whose output depends on thinking clearly for extended periods. These are not people you can brush off with a pair of headphones and a Slack channel etiquette guide.

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 beige foam panel from a ceiling tile catalogue does not cut it any more. This is why you are seeing acoustic products that function as part of the aesthetic, colour, pattern, form, all treated as design decisions rather than afterthoughts. It is the same reason nobody specifies the cheapest fluorescent strip light any more.

And the specification has to be proportionate to the problem. You do not 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 stop. Get it wrong and you have spent money without solving the problem.

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 did not 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.