Most UK offices already have some acoustic treatment. The trouble is it’s often the wrong product, in the wrong place, fixing a problem it was never going to solve. If your open plan still sounds like a busy train platform despite the panels you bought last year, one of these five mistakes is probably to blame, and the good news is they’re all easy to put right once you know what to look for.
Mistake #1: Treating Meeting Rooms While the Open Plan Goes Untouched
It’s a common pattern. Budget gets spent on the rooms with doors, while the open plan, where most people actually sit, gets nothing. Enclosed rooms benefit from treatment, but they’re rarely where the real noise problem lives.
Open-plan space is where speech carries between desks and stops people concentrating. When you leave that area bare, you’re treating the quiet corner of the building and ignoring the loud one. The fix is to start with the open plan and work outwards.
For that to work, you need decent coverage at the right height. Acoustic panels with an NRC of 0.8 or above, positioned at seated head height and spread evenly across the space, make a measurable difference to how clearly people can hear each other between desks. This is exactly what distributed wall treatment is for, and there’s a wide choice of acoustic panels for offices that suit it, though getting the placement right matters far more than the product you pick.
Mistake #2: Choosing Panels on Looks Instead of Performance
Plenty of panels look the part and do very little. A felt tile in a nice colour might tick the design box while absorbing almost nothing, because nobody checked its acoustic rating before ordering.
The number that matters is the NRC, or Noise Reduction Coefficient. It runs from 0 to 1, and the higher it is, the more sound the panel soaks up. Anything below about 0.6 still absorbs some sound, but it’s working so inefficiently that you’ll need far more of it to make a dent, which is why low-rated panels often end up doing more for the photographs than the acoustics.
Always check the rating before you commit. A good-looking panel with a poor NRC is a decoration, not a solution, and you’ll be back complaining about noise within months.
Mistake #3: Bunching All the Absorption on One Wall
When all the treatment ends up on a single wall, usually the one behind reception or the meeting area, the rest of the room keeps bouncing sound around freely. Absorption only works on the reflections it can reach.
Sound reflects off every hard surface in the room, so absorption needs to be spread across it. Clustering everything in one spot leaves the opposite wall, the far corners and the centre of the floor plate just as lively as before.
Distribute panels around the space instead of treating one feature wall. Even coverage across several surfaces will always beat a dense block in a single location.
Mistake #4: Forgetting the Ceiling Is Your Biggest Reflector
In a lot of open-plan offices the ceiling is the single largest hard surface in the room, yet it’s the surface people treat last, if at all. Sound travels straight up, hits it and comes back down across the whole floor.
Wall panels can only do so much when the ceiling is throwing everything back. In big open areas, suspended baffles or rafts often outperform wall-mounted panels because they tackle that large overhead surface directly. Watch for these signs that the ceiling is your problem:
- High or exposed-service ceilings with hard soffits
- A persistent echo that follows you around the whole floor
- Calls and conversations that sound hollow no matter where you sit
If those ring true, start above head height before you add another panel to the wall.
Mistake #5: Assuming Carpet Alone Will Fix It
Carpet feels like it should help, and it does take the edge off footsteps and the high-frequency clatter. The problem is that this is only part of the picture.
Carpet does some work in the mid-range speech frequencies that cause distraction between desks, but nowhere near enough on its own. Those are the frequencies that carry one person’s phone call straight into someone else’s concentration, and a soft floor barely touches them.
Carpet is worth having, but treat it as a starting point and not the answer. You’ll still need absorption on the walls and ceiling to deal with the speech that’s genuinely disrupting people.
Most Acoustic Mistakes Are Easy to Avoid
None of these mistakes come from carelessness. They come from treating acoustics as a shopping exercise instead of a room-by-room problem, and that’s an easy habit to break.
Look at where the noise actually is, check the NRC before you buy, spread your coverage out and don’t ignore the ceiling. Get those things right and you’ll fix far more than carpet and a few pretty panels ever could.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
