Hard floors, glass partitions, an exposed services ceiling for the industrial look, and forty people on calls at once. Open-plan offices are rarely designed for how they are actually used — the acoustics get decided by the fit-out budget, not by anyone thinking about what fifty conversations sound like at once.
How you know it is the room
- You can hear the whole floor's calls from your desk
- People retreat to booths or stairwells to concentrate
- Video calls pick up everyone else's conversations
- New starters comment on the noise before anything else
Why it happens
The 'industrial' exposed-services look usually means the single largest surface in the room — the ceiling — absorbs almost nothing.
Glass partitions look calm but behave acoustically like any other hard wall: nearly everything that hits them comes back.
Open-plan removes the walls that used to contain one conversation to one room, so now every desk shares the acoustics of the whole floor.
Typical open-plan floor
22 × 16 × 2.9 m, about 1,021 m³ — polished screed floor, glass partitions, exposed services ceiling.
Around 0.5 to 0.7 seconds is the usual aim for an open-plan office used for concentrated work and calls.
Every way to get there
Any one of these on its own, or a combination. We do not sell any of it.
- Ceiling rafts or bafflesabout 140 m²
The highest-impact single move — keeps the exposed-services look, adds the absorption it's missing.
- Fabric-wrapped wall/partition panelsabout 90 m²
Targets the glass and hard partitions directly, where the ceiling can't be treated.
- Desk-height screens with an absorbent coreabout 60 linear m
Breaks line-of-sound between neighbouring desks, not just the room at large.
- Soft flooring or a large-format rug in break-out zonesabout 80 m²
Cheapest per-m² change, best used where footfall and chatter are both loudest.
Indicative figures for the example room above, from the same method the report uses. Your room will differ — that is the point of checking it.
Now do it for your room.
Four questions, sixty seconds. Free to see whether you have a problem.
Check my room →Questions people ask
Will this actually stop me hearing my neighbour's call?
Partially — absorption reduces the reverberant build-up across the whole floor, which measurably lowers the general noise level, but it does not block sound directly between two nearby desks the way a screen or distance does. The two work best together.
We already have some acoustic panels. Why is it still loud?
Almost always a coverage problem — a handful of decorative panels on one wall move the figure very little on a floor this size. The routes above give you the area actually needed, not a token amount.
Can this be done without moving people out?
Ceiling rafts and wall panels are typically installed after hours or over a weekend. Desk screens and flooring can usually go in around a live floor.