You can hear the whole floor's calls from your desk
An open-plan office nobody can take a call in
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.
Interactive: who can hear the call
Observations
- ▸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
Causes
C1 The 'industrial' exposed-services look usually means the single largest surface in the room — the ceiling — absorbs almost nothing.
C2 Glass partitions look calm but behave acoustically like any other hard wall: nearly everything that hits them comes back.
C3 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.
Schedule of treatments
Around 0.5 to 0.7 seconds is the usual aim for an open-plan office used for concentrated work and calls.
| Ref | Treatment | Quantity | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | Ceiling rafts or baffles | about 140 m² | The highest-impact single move — keeps the exposed-services look, adds the absorption it's missing. |
| T2 | Fabric-wrapped wall/partition panels | about 90 m² | Targets the glass and hard partitions directly, where the ceiling can't be treated. |
| T3 | Desk-height screens with an absorbent core | about 60 linear m | Breaks line-of-sound between neighbouring desks, not just the room at large. |
| T4 | Soft flooring or a large-format rug in break-out zones | about 80 m² | Cheapest per-m² change, best used where footfall and chatter are both loudest. |
Indicative figures for the example room (22 × 16 × 2.9 m, about 1,021 m³), from the same method the report uses. Your room will differ, which is the point of checking it.
Queries
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.
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.
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.
| PROJECT | Typical open-plan floor |
| SCALE | 22 × 16 × 2.9 m · 1,021 m³ |
| STATUS | Indicative · not for construction |