An open-plan floor solves two problems at once: it saves square metres and makes talking to people easy. It creates a third one by itself — noise you cannot switch off. The call at the next desk, the coffee machine, people moving through: every sound asks for attention, even when you are not listening to it.
Speech sits in the worst possible band
Construction noise is loud but steady, and the brain learns to push it into the background. Intelligible speech is far worse: once you hear words, your brain starts processing them whether you want to or not. That is why a call one desk away is more disruptive than the steady hum of ventilation, even though in decibels the call is quieter.
There is a physical reason it lands so badly. Most of the energy that carries meaning in human speech sits between roughly 250 and 4000 Hz — consonants, which do most of the work of intelligibility, live at the upper end of that range. Soft furnishing absorbs the high end reasonably well and the low end hardly at all, so a floor treated only with fabric panels still passes the part of the spectrum that your brain insists on decoding. Attenuation that does not cover the whole speech band is attenuation you will still hear as words.
The second factor is unpredictability. You get used to a constant sound; you never get used to sudden laughter.
Three things that actually work
Acoustic panels and carpet. They reduce echo and shorten reverberation, but they do not stop sound travelling from one place to another. A good first step that does not replace a separated space.
Zoning. Quiet and loud areas apart: meeting corners and the coffee machine at one end, focused work at the other. Cheap, and it demands discipline.
Enclosed acoustic cabins. The only solution that gives real separation. The conversation stays in, the office noise stays out — and unlike a built room, an enclosure needs no construction work and can be moved later. The full range, with specifications and the 3D configurator, sits on the manufacturer's own site.
What 35 dB means in practice
Insulation is measured in decibels, but the number alone says nothing. The practical translation: a normal conversation held inside a cabin rated at 35 dB is no longer audible one metre away. Around 25 dB attenuates noise at speech level — you hear your caller clearly and the colleague at the next desk cannot make out your words, but it does not make you inaudible.
The difference matters for confidential conversations. If salary, health or client data is discussed inside, choose a model with certified insulation, such as Silentbox Solo. For everyday calls, Lite covers it.
What an interruption costs
Regaining focus after an interruption is not instant: getting back to the thought takes considerably longer than the interruption itself lasted. Ten short interruptions a day do not cost ten minutes — they cost a day of fragmented attention.
The question procurement asks first
When this reaches a purchasing department, the conversation stops being about comfort. The questions that come back are consistent: is the insulation figure certified by an independent laboratory or measured in-house, what is the airflow rating, what does the structural warranty actually cover, and how long does installation block the floor. On the last point the answer is unusually easy — units arrive as modules and go up in two to five hours, with no building work and no sign-off from the landlord.
The one question worth asking that procurement usually forgets: can the enclosure be dismantled and moved. A fixed partition stays with the building when the lease ends; a free-standing unit weighing between 230 and 600 kg depending on size is inventory, not fit-out.
Where to start
The simplest measure is to ask the team how often a day they walk somewhere else to take a call. If the answer is “every day”, what is missing is not space but quiet. One unit usually serves 10–15 people; for meetings see the four-person Quartet.
Three common mistakes
It is too far away. If it is thirty metres off, it stays unused and the call happens at the desk. Put it where people work.
Too few of them. A permanently occupied unit creates the same problem as a meeting room: people stop planning and simply give up.
The wrong class. A Lite bought for HR conversations does not give confidentiality, and ends up unused for that purpose.