Most startups today have an open workspace. These work-spaces are great for collaboration but allow for distractions.
Open work-spaces are cheaper for companies as it allows them to be efficient with office space. They are especially attractive for startups that want to be lean and focus all their resources on the essentials things like getting customers and achieving profitability.
Although an open space encourages collaboration and provides more opportunities for employees to interact, everyone needs some alone time to get some work done.
The cost of this can be argued to be paid off with the productivity of employees that have a spot and a place where they can sit undisturbed.
Companies should find separate ways of getting people to interact instead of going for an all-out open-workspace as a solution.
It can be said that there are roles within a company where an open space is desirable but a fully open workspace isn’t the right approach. It is a solution to a problem but it is like drinking water through a fire hose when we only needed a straw.
Unfortunately, these workspaces might not go away soon and what we can do now is to try and make them less worse.
Enter sound alerts. Relatable examples include Slack messages and Calendar event reminders. Most of these apps show a visual popup; the accompanying sound alert is the problem.
The Slack message brush sound is especially problematic. It is prevalent to the extent that we’ve become wired to look at Slack when we hear it.
The same can be said for the Calendar sound. You can be sure that if I hear that sound, I am checking the upper right corner of my laptop.
The main takeaway from this article is that we don’t need the sound notification since we are always looking at our screens.
A visual popup affects you but a sound alert can affect everybody.
The same logic can be applied to phone(message) notifications. When was the last time your work desk vibrated because of a phone placed on it.
The sound alerts have a place in the workspace for instance, for the impaired. The thinking is that they should be on when it is necessary.
Speaking Up
We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior. - Stephen M.R Covey
It’s easy to think that this isn’t an issue because no one has told you that it affects them.
One of the reasons no one has spoken up is because it’s hard for people to correct one another at work. Everyone wants to be likable and we fear that our message might be misinterpreted.
When I hear a notification, I usually think to myself that the person will eventually turn it off. This far, I have learnt that it’s not possible for someone to change their behavior unless they are explicitly told. I’d like to think of this post as a public service announcement.
Silence
Silence is valuable and it might be the difference between a productive day and one that is not. One can actually make the case that people prefer to work remotely because they get to be alone.
Being alone means that you greatly minimize the number of distractions that you experience. It’s similar to a closed office but you get the added benefit of not having to wear your headphones to block out noise.
Employees try to carve out some silence in their day by:
- working remotely
- moving to a booth/private space
- wearing headphones for longer periods than usual.
Ones actions shouldn’t force another person to change their seating position or where they work from because of a simple setting.
So what about the people that wear headphones at work and they are always plugged in, do they need to also turn off the sound notifications? Yes.
It is a simple thing to do and it will pay forward in huge ways in the future. You won’t have to check whether your headphones are plugged in when you are at work. Additionally, you also don’t have to mute your computer when you’ve forgotten your headphones.
Also, the sound notifications might also be killing your productivity when you have them on. You are basically telling that app that it can tap you on your shoulder whenever a message comes in.
If the thought of that makes you cringe, go and make that change today.
Conclusion
I hope that I have made a strong case for turning off sound notifications by trying to answer the different arguments that might be brought up against doing so.
Among other office etiquette practices, I am of the opinion that this one should be included as a Slack best-practice. At the end of the day, the productivity of an employee has a direct correlation with the performance of the company. It’s in a company’s best interests that its employees experience fewer distractions at the office.
Open work-spaces are already hurting us; we owe it to our selves and our teammates to make them less of a pain.
Were you distracted by a sound notification while reading this article? Share this article with your teammates so that you can all read in peace. ;)