Open plan offices made a lot of promises. Collaboration, flexibility, visibility. What they delivered in most buildings across Muscat was a room where nobody can concentrate and every phone call is a shared experience. The acoustic problem in modern offices is not subtle, and it is costing businesses more than they realise.
The Noise Problem in Open Plan Offices
Speech is the main issue. A person talking two desks away is clearly audible across a room with hard surfaces. In a typical Muscat office building with concrete floors, glass partitions, and a flat ceiling, sound travels easily and reflects off everything. The result is a continuous layer of noise that employees learn to tune out but never fully escape.
Research consistently shows that speech noise from colleagues is the biggest driver of distraction in office environments. It is not construction outside the window or HVAC systems. It is the person on a call three metres away. Acoustic treatment addresses this directly.
What Reverberation Does to a Workspace
Reverberation is the time sound takes to decay after a source stops. In a room with long reverberation, every sound lingers. Conversations overlap, making it harder to understand any single voice. Staff speak louder because they can barely hear themselves, which raises the overall noise floor, which makes everyone speak louder still. This is called the Lombard effect and it happens naturally in poorly treated spaces.
A standard office in a Muscat commercial tower is often quite reverberant because the finishes that look good on a fit out render do not absorb much sound. Polished concrete, glass, painted plaster walls, and hard ceilings reflect nearly everything. A reverberation time of two to three seconds in a space like this is common. For a workspace, anything above 0.5 seconds starts affecting productivity and speech intelligibility.
Solutions That Actually Work in Commercial Interiors
Suspended acoustic ceiling baffles are among the most effective interventions available. They hang vertically from the ceiling, absorbing sound on both faces. In an open plan floor with a high ceiling, baffles can cut reverberation significantly without requiring any wall modification. For Muscat offices where the landlord restricts what can be done to walls, this is often the preferred route.
Acoustic wall panels installed at ear height target the frequencies where speech sits. They need to be placed strategically, not just distributed evenly. A cluster of panels on one wall does less than panels positioned to interrupt the direct sound paths between workstations. An experienced acoustic consultant will map these paths before specifying placement.
Screens and partitions with acoustic cores help at the individual workstation level. A screen that looks like a standard office divider but contains dense mineral wool and a fabric face can reduce the level of sound reaching a neighbouring desk by several decibels. Combined with ceiling treatment, the effect compounds.
Meeting Rooms Deserve Separate Attention
The acoustic problems in a meeting room are different from an open plan floor but often worse for their consequences. A meeting room with too much reverb makes it harder to follow conversation, especially for participants on a video call at the other end. A meeting room with thin walls means confidential discussions are not confidential.
In Muscat, a lot of meeting rooms in commercial buildings have glazed fronts onto corridors. They look good. Acoustically, they are a problem on two fronts: glass transmits sound more easily than a solid wall, and it reflects sound inside the room. Acoustic glazing solutions exist, and they can be retrofitted. Inside, wall panels and a treated ceiling bring the reverberation down to a level where video calls actually work.
The Business Case
Employee distraction costs money. Studies by various workplace research groups put the productivity loss from noise distraction at a few hours per employee per week. In a 50 person office in Muscat, that adds up quickly over a year. The investment in acoustic treatment typically pays back in productivity gains within a year, and it also affects talent retention. People leave offices that are unpleasant to work in, and noise is consistently rated among the top reasons.
Akinco Oman assesses commercial spaces across Oman and specifies treatment based on what the space actually needs rather than a standard package. The starting point is understanding how the space is used, what the building construction allows, and what the client’s priorities are. From there, the recommendation is specific and costed so the decision can be made clearly.