Habitat Soundscaping

Making open offices work better

Habitat Soundscaping

Biophilia has recently emerged as a useful element to deploy for wellness. In the hands of one of the world's leading communication audio companies it does even more than that, it enables open plan workspaces to become more productive.

Here's how it works. Human beings are wired to respond to the human voice. This makes nearby conversations distracting, and such conversations are inevitable in an open plan environment. Studies have shown it actually takes around 20 minutes to fully recover from such a distraction, and this makes it a major productivity issue to address in the modern workspace.

It turns out masking the distraction with white noise as some have done in the past is not the ideal answer. Plantronics have discovered that the mask applied needs to be biophilic sound specifically and supported visually so the brain makes sense of it. Without that visual cue it too can become a distraction.

Following the first Habitat Soundscaping installation at Plantronics own head office in the Netherlands, it was possible to measure a productivity increase of 15%. This improvement has profound implications for every open plan workspace in the world, in that any such space without Soundscaping is likely to fall significantly short of its true productivity potential.

The cost of retrofitting Habitat Soundcaping is modest indeed in comparison to the productivity gain on offer. On that basis there is hardly an open plan corporate environment in the world that cannot justify the investment.

Not surprisingly, long time Ci client CSIRO has been among the first to deploy Habitat in Australia. We strongly suggest you watch the explanatory Habitat video accessible via the link below.