Office designers on the European continent have come up with an ingenious invention for this: Individual offices!

Site managers in North America rarely want to hear this, since it's more expensive and supposedly prevents close collaboration and encourages slackers, but that's just a bunch of BS. It's absolutely fantastic to just be able to close your door and have peace and quiet if you need to get into flow. Much better than being forced to wear headphones all day, for noise-cancellation or forced-music-listening instead.

We have a big problem with open plan offices in Europe as well. Individual offices are far rarer than open plan.

We have special closed cubicles which aren't assigned to anyone on every floor (I don't know their name in English) which can be booked if you want isolation but they're in such demand that they're often unavailable.

> Office designers on the European continent have come up with an ingenious invention for this: Individual offices!

Where did you get this idea from?

At best, companies have team rooms that hosts 5-8 people but not individual offices.

I work in Europe at a nice company with nice offices. It's beautiful.

Most of the time we all have our doors wide open, it's glass doors, mostly glass walls, very bright, very modern. Everybody is welcome to stop by at any time when the door is open. Door closed means "please don't disturb unless it's an emergency". People close doors to have longer discussions, to have confidential discussions, or to have peace and quiet.

The doors basically serve the same purpose as headsets. They just make more sense and are more ... human.

Yes, some offices house more than one person. Typically 2, some have 3. But the employees in this situation are quite content with this and could request single offices at any time.

I don't know how noisy the office you are referring to is, but I found that using noise cancelation headphones (bose,sony,jabra) and having Grey Noise ( https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/greyNoiseGenerator.php ) does produce good results while not being distracting.

I have a Bose Quitcomfort 35 set that I use for travelling. I can't stand the "pressure" in ear feel for a long time when the noise cancellation in turned on.

Besides, while they are good in cancelling e.g. aircraft engine noise, the active part does nothing to prevent e.g. human voices, and even high end headsets are far inferiour to dirt cheap industrial hearing protection where passive isolation is concerned.

I don't want to have to drown out ofice noise by blasting my ears with noise. I find having to wear any head/ear device a nuisance, and I tried a lot (fwiw cheap on ear Sound Blaster Jam V2's were unexpectedly comfortable and also great sounding to boot).

I have tankfully worked from home for the most part of the last decade (no, what was called WFH during the Covid lockdowns is not the same at all).

I used the paid subscription of brain.fm and was very happy with it (when I has in the office, that is). Just be warned, it's eating up lots of bandwidth and data plan.

https://www.brain.fm/

I'm currently listening to brain.fm! I'm not sure how well it actually influences your brain to concentrate, but I find it's at least a decent semi-conscious reminder to stay focused. And it does also help drown out other noises.

You mean white noise

That's just switching from one kind of noise to another.

Sound/speech masking is incredibly effective. We had a trial system in part of our old office and in the area covered by the system, it felt natural but when you knew to listen for the reduction in perceived annoyance/disturbance, it was much lower.

It’s not white noise, though: https://cambridgesound.com/learn/sound-masking-101/

(The trial was winter of 2019, then something happened in spring 2020 to keep us from going forward…)

no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise