Open-plan office noise increases stress and worsens mood: we’ve measured the effects
If you’ve ever felt your noisy open-plan office makes you cranky and sends your heart racing, our new research shows you aren’t imagining it.
Prior to the pandemic 70% of office-based employees worked in open-plan offices. Employee complaints about this design are rife.
Yet there is little experimental research investigating the effects of office noise on things like cognitive performance, physiological stress and mood.
The results of our study, in experimentally controlled conditions using heart rate, skin conductivity and AI facial emotion recognition, shows the effects of that noise are very real.
Our results show such noise heightens negative mood by 25% — and these results come from testing participants in an simulated open-plan office for just eight minutes at a time. In a real office, where workers are exposed to noise continuously during the day, we would expect the effects on stress and mood to be even greater.
We used a simulated office setting with volunteers to compare the effects of typical open-plan office noise to a quieter private office on a range of objective and subjective measures of well-being and performance. Our carefully manipulated soundscapes included people speaking, walking, printing papers, ringing telephones, and keyboard typing noises.
