How silence affects your creativity and productivity

Open office spaces with central meeting places displace the silence in our workplace. While a place to retreat to in peace is so important, a space0in-space solution is indispensable in stimulating your creativity and productivity.

An open office space encourages teamwork and communication between employees. Especially in forms of agile working, which are becoming increasingly popular, the open design of a space is decisive for success. Nevertheless, employees consider the noise pollution caused by open spaces to be one of the most disturbing factors in an office environment. And let that be a factor that does not benefit your creativity and productivity.

Creative and innovative thinking

"Silence is perhaps one of the most underappreciated creativity tools," says Thomas Oppong. Silence feeds your creativity and innovative thinking. It is not for nothing that no less than 65% of creatives need peace or absolute silence to do their best work. Professor Jonathan Smallwood of the University of York investigated the link between distraction and creativity. He showed that silence helps us focus on our own thoughts and feelings, enabling us to come up with new solutions to problems.

One of the reasons for this is that your brain literally benefits from silence, researchers from the National Library of Medicine discovered. If you are in an environment with little to no noise for about two hours a day, the area related to the formation of our memory, the hippocampus, produces new cells. These are then converted into functioning neurons, which also affect your senses. Let those new ideas flow in!

Brainstorming in silence

The fact that silence increases creativity does not only apply during your work at your desk. For example, do you and your colleagues ever take a moment during a meeting to be quiet together? A little silence to brainstorm alone increases the creativity of participants during group discussions, according to research by Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. A short break gives you the opportunity to calmly form and process thoughts about the subject of discussion. According to the researchers, this yields many more (diverse) ideas. For example, silence provides 53 percent more ideas and 47 percent more categories of ideas. It is not for nothing that Google, one of the most innovative companies of our time, has an abundance of quiet rooms in its offices .

Less noise, more effectiveness

When you're working, the slightest noise can cause a distraction. Although your colleague's phone call or the door that closes hard have nothing to do with you, it is still a call for your brain to take action. The result is an interruption of the work you would actually like to be doing. Employees are interrupted about 50 to 60 times a day. On average, it takes about 20 minutes to get back to the same level of concentration as before the interruption. Researchers at the University of Calgary confirm that working in a noisy open-plan office leads to a loss of productivity and a higher percentage of errors; namely up to 50 percent more.

Silence is the presence of space

An open-plan office is certainly not bad. Some people thrive on noise and commotion in the workplace and the collaboration between colleagues and different departments runs more smoothly. A good open workplace therefore offers the right balance between privacy and focus and has room for interaction and collaboration, so that you can choose how you want to work. For example, place a phone booth or other space-in-space solution in your office where you can call without disturbing others or can you bring silence back to your workplace? Read more about the Ahrend Qabin collection.