Office Noise: 7 Things Below the Action Values That Still Matter
Somebody raises office noise. It goes to facilities. Facilities takes a reading, finds levels nowhere near the thresholds in the noise regulations, and the matter closes.
That sequence is correct on its own terms and it answers the wrong question. The noise regulations exist to prevent hearing damage, and an open-plan office will almost never approach the levels at which hearing damage occurs. What an office does produce is a level of continuous, unpredictable, speech-based sound that degrades concentration, increases cognitive load and interferes with communication, none of which the hearing thresholds are designed to measure.
Seven things that still matter once the reading comes back low.
1. What the noise regulations actually cover
Worth being precise, because the reading that closes the conversation is measuring the right thing for the wrong purpose.
The Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005 work through exposure action values and limit values, expressed as daily or weekly personal exposure and peak sound pressure. Regulation 4 sets those values, and regulation 5 requires the employer to assess the risk where work is liable to expose people at or above a lower action value.
HSE's guidance on noise at work is written around hearing damage, hearing protection and health surveillance. That framework is entirely appropriate for a workshop, a plant room or a laboratory with equipment running, which is why a technology business with a hardware environment should apply it there.
For an open-plan office, being below the lower action value means the hearing-protection regime does not engage. It does not mean noise is not a workplace issue.
2. The duty that does apply
Two provisions do the work once the specific regulations fall away.
The general duty to ensure health, safety and welfare so far as reasonably practicable, and the requirement to assess risks to employees, both cover the working environment as people actually experience it. Separately, regulation 5 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires the workplace, and the equipment, devices and systems in it, to be maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair, which reaches building services that have become noisy.
And the organisational side sits within the psychosocial framework. The HSE Management Standards identify demands and control among the six areas an assessment should cover, and an environment in which people cannot concentrate and cannot control their exposure to interruption engages both.
3. Speech is the problem, not volume
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The technical point that explains why measurements mislead.
Intelligible speech is far more disruptive to concentrated work than louder non-speech sound, because the brain processes language involuntarily. A quiet office where you can make out three conversations is worse for cognitive work than a louder one where the same conversations are unintelligible.
This is why headline decibel figures are a poor proxy for whether a floor works. The practical measures follow from it: distance, screening, absorption, and separating the activities that generate speech from those that require sustained concentration.
4. Hybrid working has made it worse, in a specific way
The change most organisations have not connected to the complaints they are receiving.
Video calls used to happen in meeting rooms because that is where the equipment was. They now happen at desks, because everyone has a headset and a laptop. An open-plan floor at seventy per cent occupancy with a third of people on calls is a materially different acoustic environment from the same floor before 2020, and no measurement taken then describes it.
Add attendance mandates concentrating people onto core days, and the floor is at its noisiest precisely when it is fullest. Organisations that reduced their footprint have compounded this by increasing density.
The controls are behavioural and spatial rather than acoustic: enough call booths for actual demand, a norm about where calls are taken, and zoning that separates call-heavy teams from concentration-heavy ones.
5. Headsets are a control and a hazard
Where organisations solve one problem and create another.
Headsets are the standard response to open-plan noise, and they work. They also mean people are turning up volume to overcome background sound, for extended periods, every day. Contact centre and trading environments have understood this for years; professional offices adopting all-day headset use have not.
Two practical points. Volume-limiting features exist on business headsets and are frequently disabled or unknown. And hygiene matters where headsets are shared on hot desks, which is a straightforward provision question.
This does not usually engage the hearing-protection regime. It is a reason to specify equipment properly rather than buying on price.
6. Building services are the noise nobody reports
The category that produces the most complaints and the fewest reports.
Ventilation running louder after a filter change, a chiller cycling, a failing fan bearing, a door closer slamming, a printer sited next to a desk cluster. None of it is loud enough to trigger anything, and all of it changes the floor.
These fail slowly, which is why nobody reports them: the change is gradual and everyone adapts. A periodic walk with the question "is anything noisier than it was" catches more than a measurement, and it connects directly to the maintenance duty.
7. It is an accessibility question as well as a comfort one
The dimension most often missed entirely.
Background noise affects people differently. Hearing impairment, whether or not disclosed, makes speech in noise substantially harder. Neurodivergent employees may find unpredictable open-plan sound genuinely disabling rather than merely irritating. Both engage the reasonable adjustments duty where the threshold is met, and both are handled badly if the only available response is that measurements are within limits.
Adjustments here are usually cheap: a quieter located desk, priority booking of a quiet space, permission to work elsewhere for concentration tasks, and equipment. What matters is that a request is treated as a request rather than as a preference to be accommodated informally.
What to do instead of measuring
| Question | Weak response | Better response |
|---|---|---|
| Is noise a problem? | Take a reading against action values | Ask people, by team and by task |
| What kind of noise? | A decibel figure | Speech, services, equipment, identified separately |
| Where? | Whole floor | Specific zones and desk clusters |
| Calls | Assumed to happen in rooms | Booth provision matched to actual demand |
| Headsets | Bought on price | Specified with volume limiting, hygiene addressed |
| Services | Reported when broken | Periodic check for gradual change |
| Individuals | "Within limits" | Adjustment considered on request |
The first row is the pivot. A survey of how people actually experience the floor produces more actionable findings than any measurement, and it is the evidence a psychosocial assessment needs in any case.
Where the regulations do apply
To be clear, because the argument above should not be read as saying noise regulations never matter in a technology or professional business.
Where an organisation has a hardware laboratory, a workshop, a plant room, a data hall or any environment with continuously running equipment, the noise regulations may well engage and the full regime of assessment, control, hearing protection and health surveillance applies to the people working there. That is a genuinely different exercise from the office floor discussion, and it should not be conflated with it.
Periodic health and safety audits are the practical way to establish which parts of your estate fall where, and holding the findings for every site in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
For international groups
Noise regulation is broadly harmonised across the European Union through the physical agents framework, so action values are comparable across member states. The organisational side is not harmonised at all.
Several jurisdictions treat the working environment as a regulated psychosocial matter in ways that reach open-plan noise directly. Sweden regulates the organisational and social working environment. Denmark's statutory workplace assessment covers the psychological environment. Australia treats psychosocial hazards within the same framework as physical ones. In those entities, an office noise problem is more clearly a compliance question than it is in Great Britain.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses offices as they are actually experienced, which for noise is the only assessment that produces anything useful. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, finance and banking and IT and software organisations, including those with laboratory and hardware environments where the regulations genuinely bite.
Where offices span several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish where the working environment is a regulated matter rather than a facilities one, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If people are complaining about your floor and the answer has been that levels are within limits, a free gap analysis will identify what the complaint is actually about.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
