Noise may endanger employees' health - Workplace - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), April, 2002

For most office workers today, the dream of the big corner office is far cry from reality. Instead, current trends in office design have relegated 25,000,000 Americans to open-plan office space, or "cube farms," where a sense of teamwork and camaraderie may flourish--but noise distractions and potential health hazards do so as well. According to a Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., study, working in a moderately noisy office with ringing telephones, worker conversations, the sounds of office equipment whirring, and drawers opening and closing may lead to heart disease since workplace noise causes heart-damaging stress hormones to become elevated.

"Open-plan space is the current `fashion' in office design, partly because people believe it is more cost-effective, but also because it is conducive to the team concept many organizations have adopted," indicates Jack Heine, CEO of Cambridge (Mass.) Sound Management, an acoustical engineering and personal sound management company. "Whatever the impetus, more and more of these open offices are being built, which means there are more and more distractions and potential health hazards keeping workers from producing at their most efficient level."

In another study, conducted for the American Society of Interior Designers, conversational noise was the number-one complaint of office workers and an overwhelming 70% said they would be more productive if there were noise distractions. Similarly, in a study by Armstrong World Industries, 52% of workers reported that the noise level in their workplace was stressful and 81% said they could get more work accomplished if their workplace were quieter.

So what is the answer? Since it is unlikely that the open-plan office is going to go away anytime soon--and since phones will continue to ring and people will continue to talk and machines will continue to beep and drawers will continue to open and close--the next best thing is to mask the intrusive sound so that it is less distracting and stressful to the worker. One solution is a portable and affordable system designed to mask effectively distracting noise and stress in the workplace. It operates by blanketing an individual's workspace with unobtrusive, natural sound, or "pink noise," that reduces the intelligibility, and therefore the distraction, of nearby conversations and various other sounds.

The system is not like the so-called "white noise" or sound-select sleep aids, which actually produce relatively unobtrusive noise from a single-point source, Heine explains. Instead, two tiny emitters are used to create a gentle whooshing sound similar to air conditioning that fades into the background as it masks unwanted noise.