www.acousticcomfort.co.uk

Correct the Acoustic Landscape and Improve Staff Performance

While industry and commerce continue to benefit from the open plan office concept with its higher density occupation, lower dilapidation costs and reduced re-organisation costs, people who work in an open plan environment need their obvious drawbacks to be addressed. Two main issues confronting facilities and HR managers are impaired concentration due to visual distractions and unwanted noise.

Hard glass and laminate surfaces are increasingly used in office interiors. Such materials have coefficients of absorption as low as 0.2, so they reflect 98% of the sound energy generated within a space and today’s quieter office machinery no longer provides its masking effect. Acoustic control of these spaces is therefore more desirable than ever before.

Independent studies reveal how this type of environment adversely affects its occupants:

• 72% of office workers are dissatisfied with their speech privacy (UCL Berkeley study)
• 59% of employee time is spent trying to do quiet, focused work in own workspace (Bosti Research)
• 70% of office workers said they could be more productive in a less noisy office environment (ASID Study)
• 64% of office workers are interrupted up to 20 times a day (Brother Research).

Constant interruptions and distractions reduce employees’ levels of concentration and productivity. This leads to mistakes, increased stress due to inability to complete work objectives on time and the people affected have to use a large amount of metabolic energy shutting out the unwanted noise. If they are subjected to these working conditions on a daily basis, inevitably levels of illness and absenteeism will increase, as will staff turnover.

Research commissioned by Brother calculated that £132 billion was wasted in the UK in 2005 due to interruptions in the workplace. In the same year, four million working days were lost in the UK due to stress in the workplace at a cost of £530 million, according to Facilities UK magazine.

Specialists at work

Screen Solutions, Europe’s market leading designer and manufacturer of office dividing screens, was constantly bombarded with requests from designers and clients to tackle these issues and provide acoustic privacy for the workforce by employing their extensive range of screens.

“We know that screens alone will not solve all acoustic issues,” says Mark Stevens, Screen Solutions’ Sales and Marketing Director, “so we teamed up with Europe’s leading office acoustics consultancy.”

The result was the formation of a specialist company, Acoustic Comfort, whose only remit is to identify these issues and correct the acoustic landscape in office areas, either retrospectively or at the design stage.

Acoustic Comfort’s successful formula is to control the balance of products that can absorb the unwanted sound energy, restrict the sound energy from travelling uninterruptedly across spaces and manage background ambient noise level. It is called the ABC of acoustic control: A = absorption, B = blocking and C = cover.

Acoustic absorption

The key to this process is the investigative work undertaken by the company’s acousticians who analyse the acoustic profile of the space and understand the various quantums, and which products can be used to correct the acoustics of the space.

Acoustic Comfort’s consultancy partner has developed predictive software that will calculate and map the acoustic landscape at the design stage. So, before the building work is even started, the architect, interior designers and facilities teams can test their layouts and their selection of finishes.

Acoustic cover

Technology plays a large part in providing a solution to manage the ambient background sound level in the spaces. The Logison digital, fully networked sound masking system produces a completely random masking sound that the human brain does not recognise. It is designed so that the acoustician can accurately tune the system to one-third octave intervals to create the sound frequency profile and volume for each individual digital speaker to ensure that the correct level of masking is achieved in each room and area. The system can be controlled with a timer to adjust the masking in line with the occupancy level changes during each day. The equipment will also deliver zoned paging and music if required.

The comprehensive software that controls the system allows areas of the building to be easily retuned to suit any changes in business activity resulting from re-organisations.

Acoustic blocking

Acoustic control can not only used to provide comfort and improve staff productivity in the open plan areas of the building but also to provide guaranteed confidentiality in meeting rooms.

Using traditional construction methods it is difficult and sometimes impossible to create complete confidentiality in meeting rooms due to the construction of the building. Large costs in the fit-out process are wasted in trying to achieve this goal as it can limit the flexibility of the spaces and increase the cost of dilapidations.

Savings in these traditional construction methods are significant if the ABC process is engaged at the start of the design process.

Free consultation

Acoustic Comfort offers its initial consultations free of charge as they set the scene for what is achievable, provide budgets that give an idea of investment levels necessary at an early stage. This enables the project to move forward in a controlled way with no surprises for the stakeholders during the process.

With today’s high level of investment in real estate and the much larger cost of staffing, this technology is proving of great value in helping to reduce these overheads.

Acoustic Comfort Ltd
Unit D1 Newton Road
Peacehaven
East Sussex BN10 8JQ

Tel: +44 (0) 1273 579101
Fax: +44 (0) 1273 587165
Email: mark.stevens@acousticcomfort.co.uk
Web: www.acousticcomfort.co.uk

 

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