the post on your living room floor, but that’s exactly what happens in open-plan offices.”
Alert sounds in any environment are particularly disturbing – after all, beeps and buzzes were designed to grab our attention. If an alert sounds in communal space, it alarms not only the person it was intended for, but also everyone else in earshot. This is a major problem in hospitals, where the constant racket coming from beeping machinery has created a phenomenon called ‘alarm fatigue’: staff become habituated to the noise and cease to register the alarms. This doesn’t mean the noise has no effect: the unfortunate patients are also subjected to all these warning sounds, with serious consequences for sleep and stress levels, as we’ll see later in this chapter.
So, noise can interrupt collaborative working, as well as being bad for the health. A more profound issue, though, is that 4 critical work modes are simply not catered to at all in many open-plan offices.
The first is concentration, or individual working, which requires a space more like a library. Noise distraction and lack of quiet working space are among the top complaints on the Leesman Index, which has surveyed hundreds of thousands of office workers about what factors affect their productivity.
Tip: If you have an alert sound set for incoming email, your concentration will be broken every time it chimes, which may be many times an hour. Try instead turning off the alert sound and checking your email in batches at defined times, maybe on the hour every hour for 5 or 10 minutes, or first and last thing each day. You may find you become up to 3 times as productive!
The second is contemplation, or not working, which might be decompressing after some intense work or maybe gently sharing ideas in a social setting. The first of these is best done in a calming, Zen-type room, while the second requires informal, social spaces (isolated, of course from quiet working areas!).
The third is communication over distance, which often requires privacy. I have come across offices so quiet that the turning of a piece of paper is a major event. In these places there is no privacy at all, so one person making a call disturbs everyone else in the room – not to mention the uncomfortable, intimidated feeling that arises when you realise everyone is listening to your call!
The fourth is conferencing, or structured meetings in groups. Again, privacy is a major issue here: I have experienced many offices where meeting spaces have no walls, or maybe a token fabric partition, which means the sound of the meeting distracts the people working nearby, who can hear every word - and of course the sound of a lively open-plan office makes the meeting more challenging to hear. Meeting rooms need good acoustics and effective attenuation to stop sound travelling out to and in from adjoining spaces.
You have probably had many of these experiences yourself in offices that were designed purely for the eyes. Now that you know the importance of sound, you can take care to move to the most appropriate environment for the kind of work you want to do.
BEHAVIOURAL
Noise has been shown to make people less sociable, and less helpful to others. Loud, fast-paced music will affect the speed and driving style of a car. Powerful oratory can dramatically affect behaviour, inspiring teams to produce great work, converting people to religious faith, radically changing political and social landscapes or inciting mobs to violence. Roaring crowds can inspire sports teams to stellar performances. In martial arts, special words shouted with a strike increase focus and power. Soothing words, mantras and gentle sounds can induce peacefulness or even trance states.
This fourth effect of sound, changing human behaviour, is the most important one in the work of The Sound Agency, and we’ve proved its efficacy many times. One of the most dramatic examples was in the town of Lancaster, California, where the mayor, R. Rex Parris, wanted to generate positive vibes among downtown pedestrians in the town’s signature BLVD area, in order to enhance the city’s top priority – safety. We installed a soundscape incorporating birdsong, lapping water and carefully-chosen musical elements, all designed to entrain heart rates downwards and produce calming moods. The sound plays from more than 70 weatherproof loudspeakers along the BLVD. Shopkeepers and restaurant owners in the BLVD were delighted with the sound. More significantly, the Lancaster Sheriff noted a 15% drop in crime after installation, which generated global media interest including the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Daily News, the UK’s Daily Mail, KTLA and KQED radio and NBC Network News.
Research has consistently revealed that the tempo of a soundscape entrains the pace of our behaviour. Multiple studies have shown that fast-paced music causes people to walk faster, which has a significant effect in shops: if we speed up like that we generally spend less time and less money in a shop. The jolly, up-tempo music that most shops play may well be costing them money! We also chew and eat faster in high-tempo sound, so it’s no surprise that fast food restaurants usually play fast music to increase table turnaround.
We tend to move away from unpleasant sound if we can, albeit often unconsciously. If you draw a parallel with fragrance this becomes obvious: you would naturally avoid a bad smell, moving away if possible, and you might gravitate towards a wonderful fragrance. The same happens with sound. Unpleasant noise is the auditory equivalent of a bad odour, and it causes avoidance behaviours or, if we can’t get away, stress reactions. That’s why context is so important for communication, as we’ll see towards the end of this chapter and the next.
The circle
Most people I meet visualise spoken communication as a simple linear relationship between speaking and listening rather like this:
Somebody sends; somebody else receives. But is it really that simple?
Of course, the answer is no. First, we’re missing an important element. In the last few pages we’ve discovered that the sound around us directly affects all our significant outcomes in life, and that it forms a powerful context for all our speaking and listening. Sadly, this context is predominantly negative: all too often it damages our best efforts to communicate by drowning our signal in noise. Only rarely are we in a space that’s thoughtfully designed to help communication or listening, for example a concert hall or theatre.
So, because all our spoken communication exists in a context, we need a third element in our diagram:
That’s better, but it’s not right yet. We need to include one more aspect of communication that not many people appreciate – something that can be transformative if fully internalised.
Speaking and listening are not linear, but circular, they interact.
The way you listen affects the way I speak. And just as powerfully, the way I speak affects the way you listen. This is very far from one way traffic, and some of the most profound lessons you may learn on this journey derive from this one, powerful realisation. Let’s try the illustration again, this time with the circular relationship between speaking and listening.
This is the model that underpins the rest of this book. It shows how dynamic and interactive speaking and listening are, and explains why being heard paradoxically requires working on listening!
Let’s take a look at the power of skilful listening and speaking.
The power of listening
Listening may be a silent skill, but it has enormous power, as we’ll see in the next
