As a facility manager you strive to create a more productive and enjoyable workplace for your colleagues and visitors to your business. What would you say is the one factor that negatively affects workers’ perceptions of the workplace more than any other? Maybe the office temperature, or perhaps the workspaces’ visual aesthetics? Nope.
The answer actually relates to workplace acoustics. According to a recent survey of more than 25,000 workers in more than 2,000 buildings, lack of speech privacy is the environmental factor with which workers are by far most dissatisfied.
What is speech privacy? Simply put, it’s the inability of an unintended listener to understand outside conversations. People with a lack of speech privacy overhear conversations they shouldn’t and are concerned that their own conversations may be overheard by others.
This is understandably annoying to employees, and is often embarrassing as well. For example, in a recent New York Times article on office overcrowding, an employee remarked that many of his employees overheard him on the phone canceling a client meeting due to a private medical issue.
You can read the whole article here.