Three Tips to Reduce Noise in the Office

Jennie Gober highlights ways to reduce distracting noise for your office employees.

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, my name is Jenny Gober. I am a certified professional ergonomist here at Humantech (now VelocityEHS Ergonomics), and today I’m going to talk to you about three quick tips on how you can help with noise issues in your office environment.

We know that sometimes noisy office environments happen, so be it a loud ventilation system, working next to a busy roadway, or possibly some construction going on outside your window. We know that noise can be a little bit disruptive, and what we know from the research is that you’re absolutely right. Noisy environments can increase distraction and increase stress levels. So, it’s something we definitely want to mitigate.

Here are three quick tips on how we can mitigate that noise. The first tip is to provide sound-deadening materials in our office environment. This could be something like a rug or maybe a canvas print on your wall. You can also buy professional baffles designed specifically to help deaden the noise.

The second tip is to actively control the noise. If it’s something as simple as a fan, where it actually helps counteract that noise. It may sound counterintuitive, but you’re fighting noise with noise. So it can be providing a fan.. They do make sound machines where you can have maybe a nice beach scene in the background. Or you can actually purchase some very high-tech solutions where they counteract the exact, specific frequency of that noise so that you have a quieter environment.

The third tip is to provide physical barriers between you and the noise. So maybe it’s the case, if your office is next to a loud pump on the shop floor that keeps turning on and off, you can put a box around the pump with sound-deadening material in that box. This creates a physical barrier between the source of the noise and where you are. Other resources or other types of physical barriers can be things like screens or false walls between you and the noise source.

So, those are the three quick tips on how we can help mitigate noise in the office environment. Again, my name is Jenny Gober. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Thanks for joining us today, and we’ll see you next time.