Phone booths bring these amazing advantages to your office!

Today, a large proportion of all employees in Germany work in an open-plan office. Of course, this has many advantages, such as short communication channels and lower rental costs, as less space is required. Despite these advantages, the open-plan office is not as good as was once thought.

The main problem is that employees are often distracted. This is primarily caused by telephone calls and conversations from other people in the vicinity, or by other noise sources such as ring tones. These distractions all have an acoustic origin.

The problem of this "acoustic" distraction, i.e. distraction by noise, is larger than once tought. More and more employers are therefore rethinking and looking for new solutions, as the negative consequences are quite alarming.

The negative consequences of noise in the office are:

• reduced productivity (by up to 28%). Noise in the office distracts employees from their work and annoys them. One gets prevented from concentrating on their work. Every day, 1.5 hours of working time per employee are lost due to said distractions. (1)
  
  Mental stress, poor concentration and lack of motivation then lead to a sometimes immense loss of productivity. Experts estimate a loss of productivity of up to 15 to 28 percent. (2)

• More unhappy with work. Working in an open office with no privacy reduces the well-being of employees by 32%. (03) Reduced productivity reduces satisfaction. Job satisfaction is like a positive upward spiral. If one is concentrated and productive, one usually has greater feelings of success. And these feelings of success make you feel good and ensure happy and motivated employees. But if you are stressed and unproductive, you will also become dissatisfied with your work. (3) To name just one of the many examples: Satisfied sales personnel sell 37% more. (4)

• Employees skip work more often. Employees are sick twice as often when they are exposed to constant distractions and noise. These distractions and the feeling of being utterly exposed to everyone else causes psychological stress. Every person wants to be able to retreat somewhere, even if it is only for 5 minutes. Therefore, a place of retreat is very important at work. If you don't have a place to recharge mind, you will miss work twice as often. (5)

• poor concentration and focus. After each distraction you need 20 minutes to be fully focused again. (6) And distractions, such as conversations among colleagues or telephone calls, are very common in an open-plan office. A study found that about 1.5 hours of work time are lost daily to distractions. (7) One more reason to eliminate distractions, don't you agree?? 02

• lack of privacy. Some conversations simply are not meant to be heard by everyone in the office. But how do you do that in an open office? The lack of proper retreats for telephone calls and meetings creates a feeling of defenselessness and constant surveillance among employees. The lack of acoustic privacy is by far the greatest cause of employee dissatisfaction. (8)

• more stress. In open-plan offices, it sometimes has a volume of up to 70 decibels. Since the noise level is often not perceived as being so loud, the noise in open-plan offices is referred to as "silent" noise. Nevertheless, the effect is noticeable. The Association of German Doctors warns 9 out of 10 open-office employees of the following dangers: Sleep disorders, burnout and similar stress-related mental illnesses, subliminal stress (9,10,11)  

• deterioration of health. Hand in hand with the increase of stress goes the deterioration of health. The Association of German Doctors warns 9 out of 10 employees in open-plan offices of the following risks: increased risk of heart attacks, high blood pressure and digestive problems. 38% of employees are plagued by constant fatigue. (02)
  

We do not want to put the OpenSpace concept into doubt in any way. Nevertheless, these facts suggest that there is still room for improvement. The basic problem is clear. It is noise in the office that distracts employees and thus causes worse results in virtually every area.
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So how important is it for employees that office noise is drastically reduced?

It is of crucial importance for the success of employees. The work would be done more productively, faster and with higher quality. In addition, the employees' satisfaction and motivation would increase significantly. Peace and quiet at the office is the dream of every office worker.
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So how do you make sure that the noise sources no longer disturb the employees?

This is not so easy, because you have to fight the cause of the problem itself. Paradoxically, the cause is the people in the office themselves. Most of this noise is caused by the people who work in the office and not by mechanical noises such as ring tones or printers. (12) In the office, people are constantly talking on the phone, meetings are taking place or the person sitting next to you is in the middle of a video conference.

Dr Meis, a Swiss physician and company doctor, explains: (13)

Mechanical noises, such as the ringing of a phones or the clattering of a keyboard, can be blocked by brain. But not the communication between two people, i.e. speech. A colleague's phone call or a conversation between two people automatically reduces the concentration of those listening in, by up to ten percent. Attention and performance therefore decrease involuntarily without the person concerned being able to do anything about it

So how do you deal with noise from people?

You can hardly forbid talking in the office. That's impossible. So you cannot eliminate or "wipe out" noise

The Solution

You should create a separate place for this noise, where the "noise" is welcome. A place where you can talk and phone freely without disturbing anyone in the office.

And this is exactly the space we at QuietOffice create. And very successfully so.
Through the use of phone booths and meeting pods, it is possible to have loud phone calls and meetings in a room where they do not disturb anyone. During telephone calls or meetings you simply go into an office pod and talk freely. The conversational noise is absorbed by the phone booth and nobody in the office gets distracted.

It pays off to creat a seperate room for phone calls and meetings. Because: Office pods from QuietOffice bring a lot to the table.

Phone booths from QuietOffice bring benefits in many ways:

• More peace and quiet in the office

• Employee satisfaction and motivation

• Less stress

• Better concentration

• Higher productivity (from 15 to 28%)

• Increased creativity

• Retreat and privacy for discreet calls 

Are you interested in more peace, productivity and satisfaction at the office?

Have a look at our office pods or ask for an offer right away.