Working to the beat: music hath charms for many. Whereas some employers learn the lyrics, others turn off when employees tune in

HR Magazine, April, 2008 by Rita Zeidner

Managers at AMX, a designer of high-end remote controls in the tech corridor outside Dallas, mention an unusual employee benefit when recruiting promising young job candidates: workday access to an automated closed-circuit radio station that plays employees' choice of tunes.

Wearing headphones, workers can listen to the station through their computers and even hear music as they move around the office. Wired for sound, the 13,000-square-foot building has speakers in most public areas.

"We want to make the workspace as comfortable as possible so it's a place where you want to be," says Steve Byars, vice president for administration at AMX. "Music is part of the culture here."

Add music to a long and growing list of workplace trends--such as instant messaging and the ubiquity of Facebook--that flummox some human resource professionals. While few companies boast a sound system such as the one at AMX, advocates praise the music trend for boosting productivity and morale. Others fear it as a safety risk that also eats away at team-building opportunities.

To be sure, music hits a high note in the office: In the United States, nearly one-third of employees work while listening to music via an iPod, MP3 player or similar personal music device, according to a 2006 poll conducted by Harris Interactive for Spherion, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., staffing company.

Workers who don't want to buy iPods or similar devices have options. Most newer personal computers have built-in CD drives, allowing workers to play their own discs or store songs downloaded from CDs on their hard drives. Employees with access to the Internet can tune in to online radio stations or download favorite songs from peer-to-peer networks--with or without their bosses' blessings. Or they may listen to tunes they purchase from online outlets such as Apple's iTunes Store.

Not surprisingly, it's mostly younger workers who drive the trend. Indeed, some 90 percent of workers ages 18 to 24, and 89 percent of those 30 to 39, said music improves their job satisfaction or productivity, according to the Harris Poll. Only about one-quarter of baby boomers made the same claim.

Perhaps because so many younger workers tune in on the job, the trend is commonly associated with lower-level workers performing less-complicated tasks. But the typical office music aficionado earns more than you might think: The Harris Poll found that more than one-third of adults earning $35,000 or more said they listen to music on a personal music device at work, compared with only 22 percent of workers earning less than $25,000 and 26 percent earning $25,000 to $34,999.

And if you think only those kids in the art and tech departments--the ones with the sneakers and hedge-clipper hair--need music to do their jobs, you haven't been in a modern operating room.

"My guess is that some 75 percent to 80 percent of surgeons are playing some kind of music in the operating rooms," Dr. Alan I. Benvenistry of St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York said recently on the public radio program "Soundcheck."

Music in the Air

Retailers have long bought into the notion that music influences behavior--soothing the savage shopper and, more important, keeping customers reaching for their wallets. Shop owners begin playing holiday tunes months before Christmas for one simple reason: to increase sales.

Similarly, some evidence links music to increased productivity, albeit much of the findings stem from decades-old studies of questionable scientific reliability. For instance, in addition to offering its signature service--background music to calm nervous elevator passengers--the South Carolina-based company Musak wowed factory owners in the 1930s with in-house findings that the right selection of tunes could increase productivity on assembly lines by as much as 25 percent.

And in 1940, the BBC launched "Music While You Work," a twice-daily, half-hour music program to help ease workplace drudgery for factory workers. During its 27-year run, the program drew from a selection of genres, although the tune "Deep in the Heart of Texas" was banned because of a hand-clapping section that tempted laborers to stop work and join in.

Few large, recent or peer-reviewed studies examine the impact of music on worker productivity. But the limited findings of University of Illinois social scientists suggest that Musak's claims aren't entirely off key.

In a 1995 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the research team compared the responses of 75 self-selected workers who wore headphones and played their own music on the job during a four-week period with the responses of about 180 workers in the same setting who didn't listen to music. Those wearing headphones showed significant improvements in performance, turnover and job satisfaction compared with the others. The most notable improvements occurred for employees doing the simplest tasks.

Researchers hypothesized that workers were more productive because music put them in a better mood. They also supposed that at least some workers liked being able to drown out distracting sounds.