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Traditionally, offices were made up of lots of rooms and corridors, creating a lot of separation between employees and enforcing a hierarchy. The more important you were, the bigger the office you got.

Modern businesses are moving towards a more open-plan working environment where collaboration is encouraged and there is a more open dialogue between employees at all levels. While it may seem counter-intuitive to add partitions into open office spaces, it’s actually a great way to maintain an open working environment while still promoting the privacy and quiet that is sometimes needed when you’re working. This will avoid negative working environment that’d affect your productivity in a negative fashion.

Sound reduction

Collaborative working is a wonderful way to encourage employees to get creative and bounce of off one another to generate ideas. The only problem with this kind of creative work is that it often comes with a lot of noise as people express themselves.

This can cause an issue for other people working in the office who are engaged in tasks where they need to maintain a high level of concentration or people who are trying to speak with a customer on the phone.

Partitions are a great way to reduce some of the sounds in your office space because they provide a physical barrier. Some other great ways to dampen noise while maintaining an open office are:

Strategically place large plants around the office. Plants can act as sound absorbers, and, as an added bonus, they will add extra oxygen into the office environment, as well as promoting a feeling of wellbeing amongst your workers.
Soften your surfaces. Sound bounces off of hard surfaces like tile and bare wall, which amplifies it. Adding rugs and carpeting, wall hangings, and other decorative features will help your office space to look more welcoming and will help to reduce noise levels, too.
Seal any gaps. Gaps around doors and windows allow noise to enter the building from other rooms or from outside, and they allow drafts to enter, too. Spend some time sealing up any gaps that shouldn’t be there, and you will see a lot of benefits.

Create separation but maintain light

Using partitions in your office that are transparent means that you can create separate spaces without blocking any light. This means that you retain the light and airy feel of an open-plan office but benefit from the privacy of a more closed one.

There have been plenty of studies that have highlighted the benefits of natural light in office spaces. Workers who get a lot of natural light tend to sleep more soundly at night because natural light helps to regulate your body’s natural rhythms, which tell it when to be asleep and when to be awake.

Getting more natural light also means that workers have an improved mood and are better able to concentrate on their work. They report fewer feelings of drowsiness, and because they have the light that they need to do their work, natural light means less eye strain and fewer headaches caused by eye strain.

Flexible spaces

Source One can advise you on office partitions that are easily assembled and dismantled, giving you the flexibility to change your office layout as often as you would like to. Perhaps you are hosting a series of meetings for a specific period of time which means that you need more private spaces than usual, or perhaps you are working on a project which means a lot of quiet spaces are needed, whatever situation you find yourself in, using partitions means that you can easily redesign your office in line with the needs of your business.

Dedicated quiet working areas

There are some tasks which require a quiet place for workers to really concentrate on them.

People generally lose their ability to focus well when the sound levels reach 80 decibels (which is the noise level you would expect in a noisy restaurant or heavy traffic area). As you can imagine, it’s quite easy for an open plan office to reach 80 decibels.

By using partitions to create quiet working areas, you allow your workers to concentrate fully. This allows them to feel more satisfaction from the work they are doing and also means that you benefit from a higher quality of work.

Meeting rooms

It’s just not feasible to have an office with no meeting rooms at all. There will always be times when someone needs to have a private conversation, and using partitions means that you can create private meeting spaces for those conversations to take place.

You can make good use of see-through partitions that are opaque, meaning that light can pass through but that people can’t see exactly what is happening in the room. This is particularly important for things like HR meetings, where people might express emotions that they don’t want the whole office to see.