Researchers with Concordia University recently joined forces with Montreal-based acoustics firm Soft dB for a new joint study. Their results show the impacts of various characteristics on speech levels within open-plan, office environments. A new study, recently published in the journal Science and Technology for the Built Environment, uncovers some critical revelations. It demonstrates that the atmosphere, architectural style, and meeting format radically affect employee interaction in workspaces.
Joonhee Lee, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Building, Civil, and Environmental Engineering at Concordia. He agreed to be named as corresponding author on the study. To gauge the impact on speech privacy, WSP’s research team measured speech levels in two bustling offices. One of their offices was located in Montreal, and one in Quebec City. With over 70 employees in each office talking in English and French, it offered a rich dataset to analyze and draw conclusions from.
The study’s findings reveal that speech levels in these real-world environments were lower than those commonly established by industry standards. This finding underscores the fact that individual behavior isn’t everything when it comes to decibel levels in a workplace. Instead, outside forces have a much greater impact on how many of them there are. To capture these dynamics, the researchers considered background noise and room acoustics.
Lee would argue that the best office environment has a little bit of background noise. He contends that today’s ideal of an utterly noise-free environment is counterproductive. In reality, it can be equally distracting as a too-loud space. This revelation illustrates just how complex it truly is to make ideal workplaces.
What makes the study unique is their departure from the norm by using real-world offices rather than recreating an environment in a lab. This unique methodology adds rigor and credibility to the findings, mirroring more accurately how speech levels vary in a real world operating environment.