Acoustic Panels: The Polite Way to Quieten an Office

Nobody rings us to say the office is too quiet. The calls I take usually start somewhere else, a chair that has given up or a desk that needs replacing, and then, half an apology into the goodbye, someone mentions they can hear every word of the sales team's calls from the far end of the room. Office acoustic panels are normally the answer, and the answer is smaller than most people expect.

Why open offices echo

Sound has to land somewhere. Give a room plasterboard, glass, a laminate floor and a long run of desks, and every surface hands it straight back. What you hear is not one person talking. It is one person talking, plus the version of them that bounced off the window, plus the one that came back off the ceiling a fraction later. That smear is what makes a room tiring. Your brain keeps working to pull the words out of it, and by four o'clock everyone is short with each other and nobody can quite say why.

Three things usually make a room loud:

1. Hard, flat surfaces with nothing soft in front of them.

2. A ceiling that is one unbroken plane, especially a high one.

3. Desks arranged so people talk across the room rather than into it.

What absorption actually does

Absorption is not the same as blocking, and that is worth knowing before you spend anything. A panel on the wall will not stop your neighbour's call reaching you, and anyone who sells it to you as soundproofing is describing a different product to the one that arrives. What absorption does is shorten the tail. The sound goes into the material instead of coming back out, the echo dies sooner, and speech comes back as words instead of a wash.

Most of what we list for this is PET felt, which is recycled plastic bottles pressed into a board 12mm thick. It is light, it takes colour well, and it carries a ten year guarantee, which for a wall tile is a fairly relaxed thing to promise. The PET felt acoustic wall tiles come as circles, hexagons, diamonds, squares and triangles between 15 and 30cm, so a wall of them looks like a decision rather than a treatment.

Where a few panels beat a full refit

Start at the noise, not at the biggest empty wall. If one team makes most of the sound, the first panels go behind and above them. Treating the source is worth more than spreading the same money thinly around the room, and it is the difference between a change you can hear and one you can only see on the invoice.

Where the walls are already spoken for by windows, glazed partitions and whiteboards, the ceiling is the plane nobody uses. Circular acoustic ceiling baffles hang above the desks from 33.5cm up to 120cm across and do the same job on the surface you had been ignoring.

Acoustic desk screens work closest to the source of all. The oblong ones run 80 to 180cm wide and 40cm high in the same felt, and they catch speech at the desk before it has the chance to cross the room. They also give people a bit of a corner to sit in, which some days matters more than the decibels.

Soft furnishings do quiet work too. A fabric chair absorbs a little where a mesh or leather one hands it back. That is not a reason to rechair the office, but if chairs are being replaced anyway, fabric office chairs nudge things the right way for nothing extra.

Start small and listen

You do not need a coverage calculation to begin. Buy a modest amount, put it where the noise actually is, and live with it for a fortnight. Offices that genuinely need a full acoustic scheme tend to know it already, usually because someone has tried to take a call in the room and failed. Everyone else gets most of the benefit from a handful of panels in the right place.

If you would like a second opinion before ordering, send us a photo of the room and roughly how many people sit in it. We will tell you where we would start, including when the honest answer is that you need fewer panels than you were planning to buy.