You’ll Never Get Used to Office Noise. Here’s Why.

Ask most people whether office noise bothers them and they’ll say they stopped noticing it years ago. Dr. Libby Sander‘s research suggests their bodies disagree.

Libby is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Bond University and has advised Google, Microsoft and the World Bank on workplace design. I sat down with her on the Spaces podcast to talk about what noise does to us at work, and what leaders can do about it.

Key Takeaways

• People stop noticing office noise, but their bodies stay stressed.
• In Libby’s study, short exposure to open-plan noise raised measured stress by 34% and negative mood by 25%.
• Office chatter is harder to ignore than café noise because it might be about you.
• Design offices for the people who use them, not for the photos.

Do people get used to office noise?

Only partly. People habituate to noise, meaning they become less consciously aware of it. But noticing it less isn’t the same as being unaffected.  In a study led by Dr. Libby Sander of Bond University, short exposure to open-plan noise raised measured stress by 34%.

According to Libby, the body can stay stressed long after the mind tunes out. Over a workday, that shows up in concentration, energy, work quality and, as she put it, “your mood and how friendly or not friendly you might be to your colleagues.” People can look productive while paying a cost that only shows up later.

Why is office noise more distracting than a coffee shop?

Plenty of people focus fine in a busy café. The difference is relevance.

“When you’re in the office, your brain cannot switch off from what’s happening from the conversations around you,” Libby said. Those conversations might be about you, your project or a decision you need to know about. In a café, it’s “unlikely that it’s about you, unlikely it’s something that you need to know.”

So the problem isn’t just volume. It’s intelligible speech from people you know, about work that affects you. That’s the hardest sound for a brain to ignore.

How much does open-plan noise raise stress?

Dr. Libby Sander and her colleagues at Bond University set up a simulated office and compared two sound environments: typical open-plan office noise and the quieter sound of a private office. They didn’t rely only on how people said they felt. They measured heart rate, skin conductance, facial expressions of emotion, self-reported mood and performance on cognitive tasks.

“We were pretty shocked because it was a pretty short time of exposure,” she said. Stress rose 34%. Negative mood rose 25%, which surprised the team most of all.

Immediate task performance didn’t drop in the noisy condition. People kept working at the same level while their stress and mood got worse, which is why the cost is easy to miss.

The study, published in the Journal of Management & Organization in 2021, carries a clear lesson: if bodies react to noise people say they no longer hear, surveys alone will miss it.

Older research found the same gap between what people report and what their bodies show. In a 2000 Cornell study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Gary Evans and Dana Johnson placed 40 experienced clerical workers in either a quiet office or one with low-level office noise, including speech, for three hours. The workers in the noisy office didn’t report feeling more stressed, but their levels of epinephrine, a stress hormone, were higher. They also made 40% fewer attempts to solve an unsolvable puzzle, a standard test of motivation. Two studies, more than 20 years apart, found the same thing: people say they’re fine while their bodies show stress.

Does office design affect focus and mood?

Libby describes the physical environment as a “cognitive scaffold.” It either supports focused, creative work or makes it harder. “A change of space can actually change our brains,” she said.

And it applies to everyone, including people who think they’re immune. “The space still has the same effect on you… on your physiology, on your brain, on your mood, on your performance.”

That’s why telling people to focus harder has limits. When the room causes the distraction, the fix belongs to the room.

What are hero rooms in office design?

Libby sees a pattern in many new offices: impressive showpiece spaces, which she calls “hero rooms,” with poorer spaces behind them where the real work happens. Her advice is to “think about the people, not the media,” and keep asking who uses each space and how.

What workplace leaders can do

• Give people an escape. Quiet spaces let people step away for focused work or to reset.
• Move calls off the open floor. Calls and catch-ups are the speech that’s hardest to tune out. Phone booths and meeting pods give it somewhere to go.
• Match spaces to the work. Focus, collaboration and calls need different settings.
• Watch behaviour, not just surveys. Track which spaces get used and which get avoided.

Office pods are one of the fastest ways to add enclosed space without construction. Bureau booths are tested as complete units under ISO 23351-1, with speech level reduction of up to 29 dB with the Tuesday Series and up to 31 dB with the Signature Series 2.0.

Listen to the full conversation

Libby and I also cover flow, cognitive scaffolding and what she notices in the first 30 seconds of walking into a workplace. Listen to “What your office is doing to your brain” on the Spaces podcast, and browse Bureau’s range of office pods to give your team a quieter place to work.

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