A few years ago, a friend of a media reporter gave me an exclusive interview about a new book I just published. In the interview, the media reporter said something that reminds me often. He said that the noise of his open office environment made him easily distracted, and he was fed up, so he set up a member in the joint office space opposite the company office building, where he could concentrate more on his work.
All kinds of noise in the open office environment can easily distract people's attention, which I agree with and deeply understand. But the joint office space mentioned by this reporter friend can make him concentrate more on his work, which is hard for me to understand. After all, joint office space usually adopts open office layout.
But after reading a series of articles about the influence of sound on the brain recently, I began to understand why my media friends chose to work in a joint office space instead of their own open office in order to concentrate on their work.
According to the previous research, we know that one of the most troublesome problems in the open office environment is the noise that people don't want to hear.
But the latest research has found that it may not be the sounds themselves that distract us at work, but who makes these sounds. In fact, moderate office humor and gossip will help us accomplish some creative work, as long as we are not brought in by such gossip and laughter. The ideal working environment suitable for creative work is not an absolutely quiet environment without any noise, but an environment with moderate background noise level. This is why you can concentrate on your work in a noisy coffee shop, but it is difficult to concentrate on your work in a noisy office.
A research report published in Consumer Research Weekly shows that a proper level of environmental noise can stimulate our thinking and make us think more creatively. Professor Ravi Mehta of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign led some researchers to conduct a study on how different levels of noise affected subjects who were being tested for creative thinking.
Subjects were randomly divided into four groups, and each person was asked to complete a long-distance association test. Usually, provide several phrases that are far apart and guess their related words. For example, "salt, depth and foam", its related word is "sea". Creative thinking is the process of re-integrating elements from association. The further the elements of the new combination are related to each other, the more creative the thinking process or problem solving will be. Creative people have different associations with ordinary people. Creative people have extensive associations, and one element can be associated with many other elements; The average person has fewer element connections). As a group, we will set different levels of noise for the subjects during the test, from completely quiet to 50 decibels, 70 decibels and 85 decibels. The difference between most groups is not too big, but in the noise environment of 70 decibels (very close to the noise level of cafes), this group performs far better than other groups in the creative thinking test. In addition, our creative thinking level in a completely quiet environment is not much different from the background noise of 85 decibels.
Because the subjects in the noise environment of 70 decibels performed significantly better than other groups in the creative thinking test, the study believes that an appropriate level of background noise (neither too loud nor too quiet) actually helps to improve a person's creative thinking ability. A proper level of background noise may disturb our normal thinking mode and let our imagination wander, but it will not make us unable to concentrate. This kind of "distraction" can enable us to complete creative tasks in the best condition. As the author wrote: "In a relatively noisy environment, it may stimulate our brains to think more abstractly, thus generating creative ideas."
In another study, researchers used a frontal lobe electroencephalogram (EEG) machine to study the brain waves of subjects when they completed creative thinking tests at different noise levels. The researchers found that the performance score of creative thinking varied greatly in different noise environments, and it was also found that this score was closely related to specific brain waves. Like the previous research results, a certain degree of white noise environment is an ideal environment to complete creative tasks.
Then the question comes: Why do most of us hate working in open-plan offices? Quiet conversations between colleagues and soft sounds generated by the air conditioning system should help us concentrate. But the problem is that in our open office, we usually can't stop ourselves from being attracted and brought in by other people's conversations, or we are often interrupted and disturbed by others when we want to concentrate. In fact, EEG researchers have found that interference such as face-to-face communication and conversation will have a negative impact on people's creative work process. In contrast, the joint office space or cafe provides a certain degree of unfamiliar environmental noise, and at the same time, it can protect itself from being disturbed by others, and no one will come to interrupt and interfere with you when you are trying to concentrate on your work.
Generally speaking, from the above research results, we know that the ideal working environment suitable for concentrated work is not a quiet environment without any noise, but an environment that will not be disturbed by others. Therefore, finding an environment where you can immerse yourself and concentrate on your work, no matter how noisy, is the best strategy to ensure that you can complete important work.