- 1) Designate Quiet Work Areas
- 2) Minimize The Number Of People At Work
- 3) For Home Offices: Put Up A Do Not Disturb Sign
- 4) Soundproofing Walls
- 5) Use Noise Cancelling Headphones
- 6) Use White Noise
- 7) Be Creative With Your Office Layout
- 8) Have Lots Of Plants
Background noise or even lower-level noise can interfere with a person’s concentration levels. Ambient noise, according to the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, can affect a person’s stress level, whereby these stress levels lead to increased occurrences of high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, migraines, and more.
Recent research also shows that stress induced by noise can reduce dopamine in the prefrontal cortex where the brain collects information. High background noise can effectively impact one’s learning and memory capacity.
There are many ways to cut down noise levels at one’s (home) workplace and create a more quiet working environment. Some of these ideas might be rather easy and obvious, while others require some extra creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Here are some ways to block exterior sounds affecting one’s productivity:
1) Designate Quiet Work Areas
If the office is generally noisy and hectic, which might be trickier to get productive work done, setting up a separate quieter area where people can get work accomplished.
If you have space, then you can set aide multiple areas. Make sure people understand that the rooms are for quiet purposes and not for talking, music, or other noisy activities, as those are to be done elsewhere in the building (or outside).
2) Minimize The Number Of People At Work
It’s only natural once you have fewer people around, it’ll get quieter and more serene to get work done. Fewer people means less talking, fewer chairs moving, fewer things being dropped, etc.
If possible, one might want to consider offering some people the ‘work from home‘ option. This option will minimize the number of people in the workspace at any given time. Another option might be to provide more shifts, to spread the workers out over the course of 24 hours.
3) For Home Offices: Put Up A Do Not Disturb Sign
When working from home, perhaps try to put up a “do not disturb” sign at the home office door. Your family may want to be educated about its importance.
In particular, the children ought to be informed of this practice, such as to keep mommy/daddy focused on work, and its implication for the family’s quality of life. After all, this activity puts bread on the table for the family!
Whether it be the incessant disturbing by knocking on the office door, loud TV, or loud entertainment with friends closeby, all help is welcome in reducing exterior sounds.
4) Soundproofing Walls
You can get soundproofing for the walls of your office, whether it is a home or a business office. They now make some modern designs for wall panels which can be quite nice-looking.
At the same time, you could consider improving the insulation in the walls, which is an overall home improvement. This exercise can be rather expensive and time-consuming, and would preferably be done during times of renovation to get it out of the way at the same time.
5) Use Noise-Cancelling Headphones
If other options are not feasible, then noise-canceling headphones may be an option to consider. Preferably, a high-quality pair of headphones might do the trick – some even claim to be 100% effective in blocking out exterior sounds.
6) Use White Noise
Consider using a white noise machine. This is a device that has a consistent noise that comes out evenly across all hearing frequencies. It’s designed to block out excess exterior noise and will help with concentration levels.
7) Be Creative With Your Office Layout
“Put all the noisy machines like copy machines, fax machines all in one room. The layout of your office is something one should be thinking of during the renovation stage of the office, as you can’t adapt your machinery to a badly-designed office,” would be something professionals, such as Solid Construction Design suggest we do.
Perhaps grouping all desks together with sound-friendly furniture would be an option there.
8) Have Lots Of Plants
This may sound unusual, but plants can actually absorb noise. You can even have a live wall of plants, whereby an entire wall is covered with something like an ivy. This plant wall covering will be pleasing to the eye, and it will reduce the external noise in the workplace.
All-in-all, you can’t eliminate all noise from your (home) workspace, but there are many steps that you can take for blocking exterior sounds. After all, noise does affect one’s work performance, as well as its quality, and we need to be aware of its impact!
