Open-plan office noise is stressful: Multimodal stress detection in a simulated work environment.

Journal of Management & Organization , First View , pp. 1-17

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jmo.2021.17

Commentary

This study, COVID-2019 changes in the way we work in the workplace, will be an investigation of the detrimental effects of noise by human resource management practitioners.

This has been a common complaint of employees working in open plan office (OPO) environments for some time. Although self-reported OPO noise has been identified as a stressor, we were investigating the effects of noise on employees in terms of cognitive ability, physiological measures of stress, and emotions.

The study used a simulated office environment and compared the effects of a typical OPO auditory environment with a quieter private office auditory environment on a range of objective and subjective measures of well-being and performance.

As a result, OPO noise did not reduce performance on immediate cognitive tasks compared to the quieter environment, but did reduce psychological well-being, as evidenced by self-reports of mood, facial expressions of emotion, and physiological measures of stress in the form of heart rate and skin conductance.