Why Offices Need Acoustic Consultants

How offices benefit from acoustic consultancy services

There is more to a productive office environment than well positioned desks and suitable swivel chairs. The acoustics of your office is another factor as well as the look and feel. Well designed offices benefit from sound acoustics – for example, the absorption of background noise from other parts of the building. Inside and outside.

Acoustically as well as aesthetically, offices should have a pleasant working environment. Image by Alice-Photo (via Shutterstock).

For open plan offices, being able to hear yourself think or speak to other colleagues is a must. A poorly designed workspace could be bad for conversation or making telephone calls. Especially if half the effort is taken up by zoning out other people’s conversations. In this case, acoustic consultancies like ours would suggest appropriate screening or cubicles for example. Or the use of partitions, permanent or temporary.

In the office, we at Lighthouse Acoustics will work with you. For your office or offices, we will discuss areas for working, breakout spaces, and partitioned off areas. Everything will be designed around your business with a truly bespoke approach. Whether your business premises is a contact centre or a TV studio, we can turn our hands to anything.

In an acoustic assessment, we also take into account the background noise of, for example, computer systems. Also the lighting (fluorescent tubes for example) could add to the noise, affecting employees and visitors with sensory impairments. Air conditioning units could make for a noisy environment too. Outdoors, this could entail the background noise from traffic. For example: city centre traffic; lorries unloading and loading; also passing trains and vibration.

Where privacy is required in offices for focused activity – for example: interview rooms, boardrooms and meeting rooms – soundproofing may be considered.

When you enter a modern day office building, the first thing you notice is its smart interiors. Its cutting edge technology, the breakout rooms, or the cubicles. What you take for granted is the amount of ‘behind the scenes’ work that has been undertaken. A lot of it by acoustic consultants like ourselves at Lighthouse Acoustics.