Rethinking How We Address Distractions in The Workplace

Bill Zeng, Chief Technology Officer & Director, Sales Engineering, Asia Pacific, Poly (NYSE: PLT)

Bill Zeng, Chief Technology Officer & Director, Sales Engineering, Asia Pacific, Poly (NYSE: PLT)

Once upon a time, the workplace was made up of offices, which in turn were made up of desks surrounded by walls, usually with a door. Today, the private office is now all but reserved for the most senior in management, with everyone else relegated into an open office layout; essentially, a bunch of desks joined together with cubicle dividers providing some modicum of privacy.

The open office concept was envisioned by architects and designers who wanted to encourage collaboration and to break down social dividers by actually removing the physical walls that separated an office worker from the rest. Liberating people from the confines of these boxes would, in turn, free their minds and improve productivity and collaboration. Or so they thought.

It is altogether quite ironic that the result of this “innovative thinking” was that employers then took the opportunity to squeeze more people into the same amount of floor space. And when you’re sitting close enough to your office mates without separation in between, that’s when the distractions start to occur. Conference calls taken at the desks, the person next to you turning to another for a chat, that annoying colleague who decided to bring their mechanical keyboard to work, banging away at a report loud enough for everyone to hear; the list goes on.

A recent global study of noise in the workplace found that nearly one in three individuals working in open-plan offices reported being often or always distracted, pointing to noise as a chief complaint impacting both work satisfaction and productivity. Putting this into dollar-value terms, take, for example an SME with 20 employees. Presuming 53 percent are distracted at least once daily, with each taking average of 23 minutes to refocus. At an average hourly cost of US $200 per employee, those distractions will cost the bottom line over US $41,000 a week, or just under US $2 million a year.

Distractions don’t just impact productivity and focus; they also clearly impact the bottom line. So how then can employers and office managers tackle this problem?

It’s really about enabling employees to do their best work and putting them in the best possible positions to succeed, minus the unnecessary distractions

As it turns out, one way to manage this without having to drastically rethink your office floor plans is by making better use of existing huddle rooms, a by-product of the open-plan office plan. These are small rooms and spaces designed to let office workers get together for quick discussions and collaboration as needed, offering quiet sanctuary and privacy away from the distractions of the open office, while also saving the larger boardrooms for bigger groups.

According to a Frost & Sullivan study in 2018, less than 2 percent of the estimated 32 million huddle rooms globally are equipped with proper video capabilities. Given how collaboration technologies have advanced in ability while also becoming less expensive, this points to a great opportunity for employers to tap on technology to make the huddle room experience better for all.

For example, smaller-scale video conferencing solutions are more comfortable and cheaper to deploy at scale. This lets employees hold small meetings more effectively with remote colleagues or business partners using technologies like artificial intelligence, face recognition, and voice tracking.

At the same time, these solutions are also geared to minimize IT support requirements through cloud-based remote management tools. The shift to cloud-based solutions also effectively shifts what used to be capital expenditure investments in the likes of phone systems and server racks, into per-user, per-month operating expenses, i.e., from CAPEX to OPEX.

Looking outside the meeting rooms, office planners should also consider matters of ambient sound and acoustics. For instance, customer service teams may need noise-canceling headsets that allow them to communicate effectively with customers, without being affected by other conversations around going at full volume — in short, pairing employees with the right tools and technology to help them stay productive.

Taking things further, designers can consider creating an office environment that promotes collaboration and concentration, that is designed from the ground up through soundscaping.

This can be done in a combination of ways. To start, speakers are discreetly positioned in such a way that spatial audio circulates immersive natural sounds through the workplace; the sounds of a flowing stream perhaps, engineered to complement similar visual elements. Distraction sensors installed in the ceiling also monitor speech levels, adjusting the level of the sound “shield” accordingly. Water features can be used to significant effects as well. Besides being great attractors of beneficial energy in Fengshui, there’s nothing quite like the soothing sounds of running water nearby. Digital elements can be considered as well, in the form of virtual display options such as “skylights” or “windows” that complement the workplace environment with soothing visuals that blend in with the surrounding audio.

At the end of the day, however, whether making better use of spaces like huddle rooms with the right collaboration solutions, or designing more effective workspaces with the use of soundscaping technologies, it’s really about enabling employees to do their best work and putting them in the best possible positions to succeed, minus the unnecessary distractions.