The Importance of Privacy in the Workplace

Is that an accurate description of your working day? Or does it sound more like a dream? A faraway goal that might be reachable… one day? But what are the reasons why this isn’t happening?

Noise is one of the biggest factors to think about in terms of creating environments where people are productive and happy. Noise has always been a top office irritant, along with temperature and air quality. Office noise is often dismissed as one of those issues where you can’t please everyone, where one person’s productive buzz is another’s irritating distraction. But too much noise in a working environment can have profoundly negative effects on employees feeling happy and productive at work.

What does employee happiness give to a company?

It has been measured that businesses with happy employees outperform their competitors by up to 20%. When your employees are happy, they won’t look to leave the business, but instead they will keep getting more confident and proficient at their jobs. Happy employees are also healthier and more satisfied than their counterparts. They take fewer sick days and pay more attention to the tasks at hand. All this combined makes them more present - mentally and physically.

Happiness is contagious. The more people that are happy and motivated in your team, the better the team functions. Focusing on creating a happy work environment will benefit everyone involved and gives a boost to the entire business. So what can businesses can do to ensure that their employees feel happy at work?

The need for privacy

According to studies, around 85% of employees express frustration and unhappiness over a lack of privacy at work. Even the highly praised activity-based working approach, which encourages individuals to wander around the workplace to find an appropriate space for the job at hand, has privacy concerns. Additionally, the excessive noise from a lack of privacy can cause tension in the body, which can be harmful to a person's general health.

Companies must strike the correct balance between privacy and collaboration if they want their employees to have more choice and influence over their working environment. Privacy can be difficult to find in a modern, open plan office, but improved office work zones will place social and collaborative areas apart from task-focused areas, enabling workers to select their workplace based on their current needs.

How can privacy help productivity?

To keep productivity high, it's crucial to provide workers with the option of working in a quiet area devoid of distractions. An open workplace layout that lacks visual privacy can make workers feel exposed and reduce productivity by making them feel stressed and constantly monitored. A degree of privacy allows an employee to choose what their co-workers may see and safeguard their own environment, which increases their satisfaction.

An open plan office layout is constantly pitted against privacy. And after two years of lockdowns and remote working, many white-collar workers are finding it even harder to concentrate in noisy open plan environments. Moreover, the proliferation of Zoom and Teams calls means that people are more likely to be holding a distracting meeting at their desk rather than tucked away in a room out of earshot. There are methods to add seclusion, though, without sacrificing the open concept area you've built.

The rise of the acoustic hub

Deaden the noise completely and it can feel oppressively silent. But a loud office can be very distracting. So is it possible to design a perfect office that pleases everyone? This is where acoustic hubs comes in, as a sanctuary from the noise in open plan workplaces and a place where complicated tasks can be completed without interruption and distraction. At Dams we believe that every open space deserves a Chatbox acoustic hub for deep work, private calls or a creative session.

From the smallest hub, which is like a telephone booth and adequate for one person, to the largest which can accommodate groups, Chatbox acoustic hubs can be adapted and customised to fit your own office requirements, creating multiple working zones in one place. The flexibility within Chatbox acoustic hubs also allows inviting areas to be created which can be specially designed to work in conjunction with existing office furniture, accessories and ancillary products.

Designed and developed by industry-leading acoustic experts, Chatbox acoustic hubs offer privacy in its most affordable form, providing an enclosed space where people or teams can withdraw themselves from the noise within the office. The sleek, modern design is carefully crafted to provide impeccable form, function, design and durability, offering next generation privacy for a new normality.

Enhance employee privacy and efficiency

There are many different variables that make up a successful working office environment. Businesses that do not calculate worker privacy into their office equation will most likely suffer for it in the form of lost productivity, a higher turnover of employees, and the inability to properly compete with more efficient competitors. Providing workers with the proper privacy they need in order to do their jobs is a small price to pay for a successful, happy working office that can still be interactive and collaborative.

Unless you are working on a highly specific and creative task where distractions can actually add new insights to your day, let’s face it – sometimes we all feel like distractions are killing our productivity. If you are working closely with other people and know that your job also requires time and space for private conversations and deeper focus, then start looking into acoustic hubs. They are a simple yet effective solution for providing the right balance between an open and a private workplace.