Slashdot Mirror
Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are Top Distraction in Workplace, Study Says (npr.org)
Sounds, especially those made by other humans, have ranked as the top distraction in the workplace, according to design expert Alan Hedge of Cornell. A staggering 74 percent of workers say they face "many" instances of disturbances and distractions from noise. Hedge says the noise is generally coming from another person, though it's much more disturbing when it's a machine that is making it. NPR reports: The popularity of open offices has exacerbated the problem. The University of California's Center for the Built Environment has a study showing workers are happier when they are in enclosed offices and less likely to take sick days. This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds. [...] Rue Dooley, an adviser at the Society for Human Resource Management, says HR professionals often call in, asking how to manage co-worker complaints about various bodily noises.
Thankfully the people who come to work sick and the office culture that promotes sick people coming to work are blameless.
There are people who seem to think that door slams, loud racking sounds of turned door knobs and juicy Ka-chunks of door latches engaging are just fine in a scholarly/academic office environment.
The main floor of our Engineering Library has a door that is going "Rack! Ka-chunk" a couple times a minute from persons passing through to other floors, all day long.
Spent 2 full days in a conference room with colleagues from numerous other institutions working on behalf of a Federal agency in Arlington, VA.
Not one door slam the entire time. Do the Federal agency people know something about concentrating on work that state universities do not?
When I came to the USA 15 years ago (from the UK), I was amazed at the ubiquity of cube farms everywhere.
As far as I can tell, its actually only management that like cube farms (or presumably more accurately, the $$$$ saved). Nearly all the residents actually would much prefer single offices and the associated peace and quiet that allows you to concentrate and be more productive, yet the myth stubbornly persists that cubes are the "popular choice".
In my last job there was this retard sales guy who never graduated high school, but would constantly kiss the business owner's puckered butthole, and to make himself sound important he would hover around the office on the phone talking extremely loud (just like the owner of the company)
Usually the most noisy co-workers are the most subversive parasites who have 0 talent and are only trying to someone impress their superiors by their assholishness
"This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds."
The rest of the civilized world has solved this problem, it's called paid sick leave.
The popularity of these among upper management is typically because of cost or control reasons. They're much cheaper than closed offices, and management can walk by to see exactly what you're doing. Typical penny wise & pound foolish mentality. The constant interruptions that occur end up costing them much more in the long run. And if this is how they think they need to see what people are doing, they fail at being managers. It's simple enough to give people tasks with milestones, and monitor their progress. I'm fortunate in that I'm able to work from home periodically. I get much more accomplished there because the only interruptions are from the phone or the doorbell. That said, I don't want to give up the face to face discussions that happen in the break room and hallways at work.
Just another day in Paradise
Sounds — and smells — like a startup.
I was asked to take my Unicomp "clicky" keyboard (Unicomp has the license for the original IBM clicky keyboard design) home, and forced to use a crappy Microsoft keyboard because the prima donna in the next cubicle couldn't stand the sound.
This despite the fact that it was a huge, chaotic, open-office with loud-ass game developers, producers, etc. (Sony Playstation development studio.) Though we were in the more-sedate back-end/server development part of the office.
But, OK. It disturbed the prima donna. But was it my fault? Or a stupid office layout?
Really, my worst annoyance there was developers using IM to communicate, when we were in eight cubicles all together, just a few steps from each other. The plus of just walking over to the other developer's cubicle is that you can how busy they are, and decide to talk later, interrupt anyway because it is too important, etc. That is, use actual judgement instead of just casting out an IM and then stewing over it if not immediately answered.
But that would take actual COMMON SENSE.
These are by far my worst favorite. I keep hearing the voice of my mother yelling "chew with your mouth closed!" It's never a problem at lunch or wherever expected. At my desk? Why do I need to HEAR people eat? I've had several colleagues over the years carbureting their food with open mouths, with chunks falling out onto the floor. I recently had to sit next to one guy that would make sucking sounds as he'd suck his fingers clean several times during his snacks, which were constant. Vegetarians & vegans need to eat quite regularly. The clanking of spoons on porcelain bowls. The resonance of hollow skulls munching on granola. The mushy sounds. My tolerance is about five minutes. Annoyance sets in at ten. Aggravation at fifteen. Psychosis at thirty. The last job... I took a lot of walks. This one guy would load up a bowl of snacks and proceed to noisily eat them for two hours slowly, savoring every bite and letting us all know. Without headphones, I would be in jail from my murderous rampage. I'm trying to grasp fifteen concepts in a head that can, at best, hold seven at once. The repetitious unnecessary noise of gluttony is a distraction.
To be fair the unicomp is about as loud as a keyboard gets - you could always get a cherry mx brown and have all the tactility with less noise.
Worker: doing any actual work here is difficult with all the noise..
Boss: well, I manage just fine
Worker: I said actual work
Cube farms were a step up from the open offices of the 50's/60's. Then the hipsters decided that cubes were bad and that open offices were the way to go. But the irony is that they are now discovering what was learnt in the 60's. From Cubicle
Propst concluded from his studies that during the 20th Century the office environment had changed substantially, particularly in relation to the amount of information being processed.[1][2] The amount of information an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain had increased dramatically. Despite this, the basic layout of the corporate office had remained largely unchanged, with employees sitting behind rows of traditional desks in a large open room, devoid of privacy. Propst's studies suggested that an open environment actually reduced communication between employees, and impeded personal initiative.[1][2] On this, Propst commented "One of the regrettable conditions of present day offices is the tendency to provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone."[1][2] In addition, the employees' bodies were suffering from long hours of sitting in one position. Propst concluded that office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing.
It's sad that the wheel keeps being reinvented.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
I do my job amazingly. In fact, I'm not paid accordingly. You should adjust my pay upward by about a fifth to a third annually.
Thanks.
And this, of course, applies to everyone but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
...is /.
I share an office with another person (with a cubicle dividing wall between us, finally), and while I do get along with him, some days the constant sighing just wears on my nerves (like today, now). So loud, even my headphones with Rammstein playing doesn't drown it out. When he's not sighing constantly, he usually has his ear buds in with bagpipe music so loud I can hear it over my music. Very distracting. I had an office to myself for several years, which was awesome, close the door, have music over the speakers. I miss those days.
How things have changed. In the 90's I went to a startup (sw) and we had offices, all of us. The company we left had switched from offices to cubicles. And in keeping with true PHB mentality, the prior company had taken a poll if we wanted to stay in offices or switch to cubes. They pinky-swear promised they would do what the employees wanted. Of course the employees overwhelmingly voted for offices and when the results came in, the PHB's said we "know" you really wanted cubes, soo they went to cubes.
Where I work there's a guy sitting about 2 metres away who grinds his teeth. Constantly. Every single day. Have you ever heard the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt"? This is a perfect example. The sound is not unlike the creaking sound an old wooden chair makes when you sit in it.
Then there's the guy who purposely sneezes as loud as he possibly can for reasons only he knows.
Now, one of them makes noise without realising it and stops when he's asked to (briefly) but the other...
Working every day with either of them is bound to make any sane person pissed off.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Not only are our half height cube walls WAY more expensive than stick and drywall ($1200 per wall, 4 per cube 8 cubes in our area) but we have no privacy. The big issue with a lack of privacy is that 3 of us work with instructors and discuss student grades, etc. Which leads to possible FERPA violations - our dept. secretary and work study students have no business hearing me talk about a students grades with an instructor. And, since I am an adjunct instructor as well as a admin/professional employee, I discuss my students grades with them - and NO ONE else in my department has the right to hear any of it.
Did the facilties folk or my boss listen? Nope...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Yep. Our building did this earlier this year. They pretended to ask our opinion on the matter (they had an 'express your thoughts' board up for a few weeks until it suddenly disappeared one day after 99.9% of the comments were negative with a few suspicious sounding positive comments mixed in) but we later found out that the plan was already in motion long before that board went up. So far they've done the upper floor and the response has been resoundingly negative. People complain that there's no privacy and they can't get any work done because their 'desks' are so small now. Basically they went from a standard cubical (with a wrap around desk) to a 3 foot piece of desk (with tiny little dividers on each side). The 'desks' are barely large enough for a computer and a phone.
We found out that they went ahead with the project because some vice president had it on their objectives this year because it saved money due to the fact that they were able to cram more people into the building rather than open a new one. Of course they didn't think about parking or bathroom space when they did that calculation so both are a disaster. Thankfully I'm in a secure lab that they've decided to ignore because they can't cram more people in due to security concerns. We've had tons of people try to get their managers to move them in though, even though they have absolutely no reason to be in here other than they don't like the new 'desks'.
Yup.
It's not so much that the cool tech companies have open offies. It's that they just buy desks and can't afford fancy cubicle furniture.
Is there some benefit to open office seating? Yes. For small groups in their own, partitioned area sure. Small teams workign together can collaborate easily.
Opening the whole office like that? Hell no. There's no real collaboration across 5 rows of desks without shouting and interrupting everyone in between. I've been through the transition from cubes to more open cubes, to very open 'cubes' to full open office, non-partition desks. I work out of my secondary office now because the noise is impossible. I can't even hear what's being said on conference calls half the time because someone is having some loud conversation (or socializing or whatever) 5 feet from me.
Oh, and my company decided anyone who's not an executive gets these new 'wonderful' seats that 'employees love'. Right.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I'd be more active and less whiny about it. One day when working late I'd pour epoxy all over the keyboard.
If you replaced it, I'd see what facial indentations it could make.
You seriously use a keyboard like that in an open office? Speaking of prima donna ... I heard there's someone upset by the type of keyboard they're using now.
Bait aside, this is a perfect exampe of the types of distractions you get in open offices. People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Actually, constantly distracted thumb twiddlers who know how to, say, program, but have given up trying to get real work done cost way more.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You can call OSHA about the bathroom situation.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Desks! Bloody luxury.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
At one job I worked at, management installed software to remotely monitor the desktop of each workstation. One morning my supervisor came running over to inform that I can't be browsing Amazon on company time. That is until he saw that I had a breakfast burrito in hand, as company policy allowed employees to browse the Internet on their breaks. I told him to bugger off. The workaround for many employees was to buy a Wifi-enabled PDA and browse the Internet via the open access point next door. Since we were hunched over our desks while using our PDAs, management throught we were working hard as no one was browsing the Internet on their PC.
When I started my first "real" job there was a guy on my intake who after a couple of months got transferred to some esoteric team. When I asked how it was going he said it was OK, apart from the guy who constantly quacked.
I thought he was taking the piss. I went round there a few days later (you couldn't just walk in; it was semi-secure but I found an excuse) and it was totally true.
I caught up with him ten years later. He was still there. I didn't ask whether he got used to it or just strangled the loonbag.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You have to realise that there are some people who over the years have gone or are going completely nuts working in an office 9-5, Monday to Friday. Given mortgage, bills, car and other completely idiotic responsibilities we've unfortunately taken on, the choices are (1) make quacking noises at desk or (2) take the rope you keep on top of your wardrobe, tie it around a beam in your garage, put the other end around your neck and jump off a chair.
I am one of those people.
Thank you for your understanding.
but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
Which they then congregate outside of to loudly talk with each other, various minions, visitors, etc. Right next to my cube. Or, my favorite: conference call on speakerphone with the door open. Then they get indignant when I close the door for them. Especially if I use superglue to keep it closed.
And using the speakerphone in the cube farm should be a capital offense.
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
Dealing with this problem for a couple of years now. The Workplace Resource guys just don't care about all the evidence I have collected so far. The cheaper open seating environment seems to work for them, in terms of saving money. Lost productivity is nothing they're measured on.
In the bay area, I'd bet heavily that this is not true, even despite the huge cost of land there. A typical worker's desk is about 2 meters wide, and they need a bunch of space behind them to wheel back into, so lets go with 2.4m x 2.0m - this is conveniently the standard "minimum" area a worker should be allowed as defined by the HSE in the UK. Compare that against an office, plenty I've seen have been of the order of 3.5m square for two people sitting in opposite corners. Lets call it 4m square to account for walls and doors etc (probably an overestimation)
So then, we're talking about 4.8 square meters for a worker in open plan, and 8 square meters for a worker in an office. In the bay area, office space leasing costs about $500 per square meter per year, so you're looking at $1,600 per year overhead for putting workers in 2 man offices vs open plan.
A typical bay area engineer salary is of the order of $160,000 a year (plus bonuses etc). For seniors, more than that even. That means you only need to make a worker 1% more efficient by sticking them in an office for it to pay off. The reduction in sick days (if you can cut out 2 sick days a year, you've made them 1% more efficient) alone accounts for that. Add their increased happiness, and productivity, and it's very very likely to be a huge win sticking people in offices.
It was really exciting and a lot more fun than having my own office.
11 is never a reasonable volume.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Yeah when we were being moved into our "open office environment" crap, we got all the talks about how studies showed it helped people work better (when the info was the exact opposite) and that people "collaborate" more and all. Bullshit, just be honest and say you're doing it because it's a lot cheaper. I can at least respect being told the truth rather than being lied to.
I ended up buying a pair of Parrot Ziks and drown out the outside noise with the music/movie of my choice off my ipad. I need music or the TV in the background when working at home to actually work anyway... I can't work in complete silence. I used to listen to music in my office, at a reasonable volume so it didn't bother neighbors, when I was in an office.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
There is an old Klingon proverb.
Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.
This space unintentionally left blank.
11 is *always* a reasonable volume.
I've worked in all three common styles: office, open and cube. I'd take a cubicle over the open plan any day of the week. I'd LOVE a cubicle. I had plenty of personal desk space, a place to put my things and hang my coat, and just enough privacy to get work done if I needed to concentrate. Cubicles are amazing.
Offices are better, no doubt. They're everything a cubicle is and more. But the open floor plan is so fucking bad that cubicles seem like luxury by comparison. Given that there are realistically only two optionsâ"virtually no company is going to build offices for everyoneâ"you bet that cubicles are "popular". The open plan is a blight; the only people that like it are penny pinchers and people that think that constant interruptions are the same thing as collaboration.
Cubes aren't inherently bad. I have been in offices which use cubes which have been lovely and I have been in offices which use cubes which have been shitty and the difference is very simple: did they choose cubes for flexible plan seating, or did they choose cubes because they couldn't afford walls? If the latter, they use short, cheap cube walls that do little to nothing to block noise and which everyone can trivially "groundhog" over. If the former, then they have 8' tall, sound-deadening cube walls. They can actually make your cube quieter than an office, if the ceiling is also sufficiently sound-deadening. I used to work at Silicon Engineering and I knew someone who worked for Parallel Computing. We had the cheap short shit cubes. They had the big tall plush cubes. Not only are they better for workers, but they actually look more professional.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Correct. However, management loves hearing the accountant (who did the simple calculation of savings per employee * number of employees) who says "hey, we can save $xK/month". But no one listens to that same accountant when he says "hey, we might be losing some money because we have everyone packed in like pigs heading for slaughter."
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
Admittedly there are military environments where frequent, loud, startling sounds serve some operational purpose. An engineer working as a civilian contractor described a restless night spent underneath the catapult deck on the Ranger. Launching and recovering aircraft is part of the military mission in our nation's defense preparedness.
On the other hand, I read on Foxtrot Alpha that keeping things quiet is part of the culture onboard submarines. It is part of the military mission of reducing the probability of being detected by adversaries using passive sonar. Also, given the insane 18-hour days of 6 hours on watch or duty station, 6 hours personal time, 6 hours rack time (shared in a "hot racking" scheme), making loud sounds quickly earns the wrath of your superior and the resentment of your comrades.
In PBS Nova describing the contractor competition leading to the Joint Strike Fighter, the areas where the engineers worked appeared to be open-plan office arrangements without much solitude. Where the avionics software was developed was a "cube farm", yes, but it had subdued lighting and the office space had the "vibe" that a culture of keeping the noise levels down to foster concentration was the norm.
I have no idea regarding the work environment in the Combat Information Center of a surface combat Navy ship, but if I were engineering one or commanding one, I would put a premium on minimum aural distraction. Would the same apply to sonar operators?
With respect to persons in the military being conditioned to "screen out" distractions and focus on their duty station, I suppose there is a place for that. But would you want a Special Forces operative on night patrol in the habit of disregarding distracting sounds? I would think you would want people with acute hearing who are hyper-sensitive to sounds, say of an enemy sentry screened by cover pulling back a rifle bolt.
As to learning to focus on one's task, that applies to the original posting and the question of whether door slams, coughing, loud conversation, background music that you don't control merits any concern by management having an interest in the productivity of their workers, especially those in engineering or coding or other tasks requiring a flow between short-term and long-term memory?
As to my complaining ways that I need to reform, I was observing that an arm of the Federal government thought to provide a remarkably quiet environment for persons providing volunteer service in reviewing grand proposals whereas an arm of a State government thinks it no big deal that the persons they are paying to write grand proposals to bring critical funding in are working in a boiler factory? Sometimes the Federal government is much more enlightened than the state-level rubes.