The NEBB Professional 2024 - Quarter 2

Rethinking Workplace Noise: Taking Inspiration from Nature By Evan Benway

At the beginning of human history, the built environ ment looked quite different from how it does now. It consisted of caves, huts and temporary dwellings be fore more permanent structures began to be formed from materials like clay, mudbricks and stone. As Stephen Kellert, a renowned professor of social ecology, points out, humans evolved in “a sensory world dominated by critical environmental features such as light, sound, wind, weather, water, vegeta tion, animals and landscapes.” The move to predom inantly urban environments is a historically recent phenomenon. In the midst of all the change sweeping workplace and commercial real estate, it is particularly useful to think back to the natural environments humans occupied for most of history. Doing so is a reminder of some basic needs — the foundations of healthy and comfortable buildings — which have been neglected. The sense of hearing is exceptional, both in its power and the degree to which buildings have frustrated it. Hearing is the body’s early warning system. Ears are always on, even during sleep. They give living beings

extraordinarily detailed information about their sur roundings, in all directions. And of all the senses, hear ing is the one that affects people the fastest. It is no surprise, then, that complaints about noise are top of the list in modern workplaces. Some spaces are stressful and distracting; others lack privacy. Some are too quiet, while others are too loud. After years of sol itude working from home, these problems have only intensified as people return to the office. Leesman’s re search this year found that dealing with issues relating to noise is the environmental change that could make the greatest positive difference to employees’ experi ences in the physical workplace. Workplace soundscaping Soundscaping is the act of bringing designed sound into an indoor environment to support people. While often designed to be subtle and ambient, it is nonethe less a profound change from how sound in workplaces has previously been considered.

Historically, the focus in workplaces has been on one sonic metric: loudness. There has been a concert

The NEBB Professional | Quarter 2 | 2024

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