Balance between quiet workplace and necessary discussion

Question

We are having some strain in the team due to the level of noise in the office.

Background: We share a single office with a team of six software developers. We generally have a good team atmosphere, and frequently collaborate, discuss problems and pair program.

However, some team members feel that the room is often too noisy due to discussions between team members. At the same time, most of this discussion is important, and we do not want to suppress it, or stifle it by pushing it to "formal" meetings.

This also seems to partly boil down to different work habits: Some team members prefer a relatively quiet environment, while others thrive if it is a bit more lively.

How can we best resolve this conflict, without either the quiet teammates feeling unable to do work, or the livelier ones feeling suppressed? I am particularly interested in examples of how other teams resolve this, both social and technical solutions.

Some solutions we tried:

• Headphones for screening out the noise: Helps, but not everyone wants to listen to music or white noise the whole time; also, can get uncomfortable after a while.
• Leaving the room for discussions: Also helps, but a) does not work well for short discussions, and b) inconvenient, because we do not have another room nearby where we could go.

Answer 1

One easy solution would be chat. Having to type to talk to a person sitting next to you might seem weird at first, but:

• It's almost silent, the only noise being the keyboard, but that's a noise you can't do without in a room full of software developers,

• An often overlooked benefit of using chat for work related discussions is that you have an instant log.

I'm favoring quiet work environments, and when I had similar conflicts in the past, using chat for short conversations worked beautifully, and (almost) everyone was happy. In combination with headphones for the music lovers and taking longer conversations out of the room, everyone was happy ;)

Answer 2

Brutal truth (and I expect some downvotes for this): the "quieter ones" are going to have to suck it up and learn to live with it -- and be thankful they don't work in an open-plan office of 50-100 people. And they can learn, take it from one who has.

Honestly, it's good to hear the general work chatter of people doing the same work that you are. Your attention may be drawn by a few keywords to someone making a mistake that you can stop them making. And if you really need to shut yourself out then that's when headphones come into play -- music is just as much noise as chatter is, but it is relatively constant and thus less interruptive.

But, that said, the rest of the team can keep in mind a few things:

• Short, interruptive sounds, like calling someone across the room, disrupts everyone's flow (especially those with the same name, which is a situation I've been suffering recently).
• People moving around is disruptive even to people with headphones on. Sometimes it's necessary, often it isn't.
• Save non-work-related chat until the whole team is out of flow. In my experience, this does happen, at least a couple of times a day, in any team.
• There should be some kind of signal that says "I'm really focussed, do your best not to disturb me." For me, that's wearing headphones, but be imaginative.
• Don't be one of those people who, when they hit their low ebb, decides that they need to tell a joke or talk about last night's game to anyone who's listening.
• If two unrelated conversations break out in the same office, it often ramps up as they compete with each other.

A consistent hum of noise is not a problem, once you get used to it. And I've come to believe that it is necessary, in a successful team. But a sharp change in the level of noise gets everyone's attention. If you can quickly identify that it's not of interest to you then you can return to the flow without too much disruption (as long as it's not every minute). But if you have to answer a door, or even look up from your work, it's a very costly interruption.

In our office (remember the open-plan office of 50-100 people), we have tried everything, from quiet times (yes, it did feel like kindergarden) to chat clients to don't interrupt signs. None of it works, I'm sorry but that's the way it is.