Continuing Education

The rattling of an air diffuser, the pinging of an elevator, the laughter of colleagues gathered around the water cooler, the conversations of neighbors overheard loud and clear: such distractions in the workplace are so irksome that acoustics consistently rank as the No. 1 or 2 complaint on employee surveys, with poorly designed open offices largely to blame. “It’s not easy to deal with noise,” says Bill LaPatra, a partner with the Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun. Unlike thermal discomfort, the other top-ranked workplace complaint, “You can’t just put on a sweater” to fix it, he says.