Cutting Costs and Improving Margins
As a small business owner, you’re constantly looking for ways to cut costs and improve your margins. And it’s those “hidden costs” that keep you up at night. You’re here because you’ve got a noise problem in your office. Odds are good it’s much more serious than simply a minor annoyance.
Paying attention to your office’s acoustic environment goes way beyond feng shui. Ignoring your office acoustics actually has a strong negative impact on your bottom line. Here’s why: among professional researchers, conversational distractions are generally considered to be the biggest cause of lost productivity in open workplaces.
Most office spaces are designed to be quiet. Too quiet. You’ve heard the saying, “it’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop.” In a library, for example, you can hear a whisper from across the room, and – almost as if they have a mind of their own – your ears naturally tune in to that whisper, requiring significant mental effort to focus on the task at hand. Now imagine your workers doing this all day…every day.
How distraction affects your company
The constant distraction means your workers aren’t running on all cylinders. In fact, in most office environments, such noise results in what is commonly called “disengaged employees.” Disengaged employees:
- Are 18% less productive
- Have 27% higher rates of absenteeism
- Are 20-40% more likely to seek employment elsewhere
That last one is big. Curious about what turnover costs your company? A good estimate looks like this:
- 30-50% of the annual salary of an entry-level employee
- Up to 150% of the annual salary of a mid-level employee
- Up to 400% of a specialized employee’s annual salary
What does this look like in your business? Well, do the math. If your small business employs 50 entry-level workers, each making $30,000 a year and experience a 10% turnover rate, that revolving door is costing you $75,000 a year. In a specialized role like a network engineer or a paralegal, you’d be spending more than twice that amount per employee.
Even worse, office distraction is usually a hidden cost, because it’s an easy-to-miss problem. In fact, in a recent survey, 81% of business owners were not concerned with office noise. This is understandable: office noise probably won’t cause a mass exodus from your office. However, the same survey revealed that 80% of their workers considered office noise to be a significant problem. Instead of a mass exodus, your best workers will simply get tired of the distractions and stress, and leave one or two at a time – and the ones who stay will be far less productive. Like a leaky faucet, those drips add up.
If you’re ready to join the 19% of business owners who aren’t losing money due to distracted or disengaged employees and unnecessarily high turnover rates, contact us today! We’ll help you improve your acoustic environment… and your bottom line!
