Effects of acoustic environment on work in private office rooms and open-plan offices – longitudinal study during relocation

Abstract

The aim was to determine how the perceived work environment, especially acoustic environment, and its effects differed in private office rooms and in open-plan offices. The subjects consisted of 31 workers who moved from private office rooms to open-plan offices and who answered the questionnaire before and after the relocation. Private office rooms were occupied only by one person while open-plan offices were occupied by more than 20 persons. Room acoustical descriptors showed a significant reduction in speech privacy after relocation. The noise level averaged over the whole work day did not change but the variability of noise level reduced significantly. Negative effects of acoustic environment increased significantly, including increased distraction, reduced privacy, increased concentration difficulties and increased use of coping strategies. Self-rated loss of work performance because of noise doubled. Cognitively demanding work and phone conversations were most distracted by noise. The benefits that are often associated with open-plan offices did not appear: cooperation became less pleasant and direct and information flow did not change. Nowadays, most office workers, independent of job type, are located in open-plan offices without the individual needs of privacy, concentration and interaction being analysed. This intervention study consisted of professional workers. Their work tasks mainly required individual efforts, and interaction between other workers was not of primary concern, although necessary. The results suggest that the open-plan office is not recommended for professional workers. Similar intervention studies should also be made for other job types.

Keywords:

• open-plan offices
• landscaped offices
• private office rooms
• work performance
• indoor environment
• productivity
• speech
• office noise
• acoustics
• office satisfaction
• speech intelligibility
• irrelevant speech effect

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the company who put their premises and workers at our disposal. The work was started in the Productive Office 2005 project, which was financed by 27 companies and Tekes. The work was completed during the MAKSI project (‘Modelled and perceived indoor environment’), which was financed by 11 companies and Tekes. Thanks to Ms Annu Haapakangas for giving comments on this manuscript.