Your business is serious business. You emphasize imagination and innovation and creativity, and your ideas have enormous value. You exist in an intensively competitive environment, where the competition is other companies but also wasted time and lost efficiency. You do some of your best and most important work in your conference room and other meeting spaces; here you are able to reach the pinnacle of collaboration, and your best ideas flow in open discussion. You also have secrets, sometimes just from competitors, but let’s face it, sometimes your strategy and planning need to be secret even within your own organization.
This is you, right?
The design of your office space – free flowing, open, cheery – is prone to sound leakage from conference room to surrounding areas. Unless you built the room like a recording studio, what is said in the conference room or board room is heard outside. You are broadcasting trade secrets, plans, strategy, the underpinning of your business. Even if not critical information, board room discussions are distracting for those outside, in the hallways and work spaces.
To foster a truly creative environment, you need a workplace free of distractions.
Cambridge Sound Management has a perfect solution in the form of the Qt Conference Room Edition. Sound masking, a long-standing approach to increasing acoustic privacy and reducing distractions, in this case is applied to the area around the conference room. A subtle sound resembling a smooth HVAC flow of air is widely dispersed outside the conference room from tiny ceiling-mounted speakers, called emitters. Room occupants activate the system at a meeting start, or it can be left on all the time. Status signs confirm that privacy is intact for meeting room participants and for those outside.
The price is reasonable, too. CSM’s patented direct-field technology makes the installation straightforward and non-invasive. The system is appealing for the corporate team using the space, and it’s good business for the architect, consultant, or professional AV installer who focuses on board rooms and commercial spaces.
CSM can provide you more information at www.cambridgesound.com/conferenceroom
Stephen Shenefield is a veteran consumer electronics and audio product designer; he is an alumnus of Cambridge Sound Management. You can read more of Stephen’s own blog postings about product design at www.vaetr.com.