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Posted: Thu 25th Jun 2026
Last updated: Thu 25th Jun 2026
7 min read
There's a moment, somewhere between hiring your sixth and your 15th employee, when the open-plan office that worked beautifully starts to feel like a problem.
If that sounds familiar, you're not alone, and you don't need to choose between a library and a call centre.
There's a middle ground that keeps the team feel without sacrificing focus, and it doesn't always start with a fit-out.
Open-plan offices were designed around a particular bet – that the gains from spontaneous collaboration would outweigh the costs of distraction.
At small headcounts, that bet usually pays off, but once you add bodies, calls, screens and the occasional sales pitch, the maths starts to shift.
Recent UK research backs this up. According to a study of 2,000 UK office workers commissioned by Oscar Acoustics, staff lose an average of 26 minutes of productive time per day to office noise, which adds up to more than three working weeks a year.
Forty-four per cent said an overly loud office had hampered the quantity and quality of their work, while 61% admitted to working from home specifically to concentrate, even on days they were scheduled to come in.
That last figure is the one to pay attention to. If your team are slowly drifting back to their kitchen tables, the office isn't doing its job.
And while letting people work from home indefinitely brings its own set of challenges – from the hidden risks of hybrid working to harder onboarding for new joiners – fixing the office is usually the better answer.
The most common mistake at this stage is treating the choice as binary:
You keep the open plan and put up with it.
You build solid walls and lose the collaborative feel that made you choose open plan in the first place.
But there's a third option, and it's where most growing teams end up.
The principle is sometimes called "visual connectivity". The idea is that you give people enclosed acoustic space – like a quiet pod, a phone booth or a partitioned meeting area – while keeping clear sightlines through the office.
People can still see each other, wave across the room, spot when a colleague is free for a chat, but just stop hearing each other's calls.
Glass partitions and acoustic pods are the way most growing teams solve this.
Glass gives you the focus benefits of an enclosed room without the closed-off feeling of plasterboard walls, and partition systems are a lot less disruptive to install than you might expect.
If you do go down this route, the choice you'll quickly come up against is whether to go frameless or framed.
They're not interchangeable – the differences in cost, acoustic performance and how flexible the space stays as your team changes shape are worth understanding before you commit.
Radii Planet Group's guide on frameless and framed glass partitions walks through the trade-offs in plain terms, and it's a sensible starting point before you brief a designer or contractor.
Acoustic pods and phone booths often work alongside partitioning rather than instead of it.
They're typically freestanding, easy to relocate and particularly useful for the kind of one-to-one calls or quick focused work that would otherwise tie up a meeting room.
If a fit-out isn't on the cards yet, or you want to see how much you can fix without spending money first, there's a fair amount you can do with what you've already got.
Soft furnishings absorb sound, so rugs, curtains, fabric chairs and acoustic-friendly wall art will all take some edge off the noise.
Hard surfaces (concrete floors, glass walls, exposed ceilings) bounce sound around, which is why so many trendy modern offices end up unbearably loud.
Behavioural changes help too. A team-wide agreement on a daily focus hour, where Slack goes quiet and meetings are off-limits, costs nothing and tends to be popular.
Moving the loudest functions – usually sales calls and client meetings – away from the focus-heavy desks makes a noticeable difference, as does a clear etiquette around taking longer calls in a meeting room rather than at your desk.
Headphones are the personal version of the same fix and a fair stopgap while you sort out the bigger picture.
Between the free fixes and a full partitioning project, there's a useful middle layer.
Acoustic panels, the kind that mount on walls or hang from ceilings, can transform a noisy space without anyone having to swing a hammer.
They're modular, often surprisingly affordable, and the better-looking ones double as decoration.
Booth seating, banquettes and high-backed sofas create informal pockets of acoustic privacy in the middle of an open plan arrangement, which is useful for one-to-ones and the kind of conversations that don't quite warrant booking a room.
And on that note: a genuinely well-functioning, properly bookable meeting space, with a calendar everyone can see and a culture of using it, removes a huge amount of ambient pressure from the rest of the office.
If your one meeting room is permanently occupied, it's probably time for a second.
It's also worth saying that flexibility around when and where people work is part of the picture.
If you have employees who genuinely focus better at home for certain types of work, the answer isn't to drag them in for the sake of it.
For practical guidance on designing hybrid arrangements that work for both employees and the business, the CIPD's flexible and hybrid working resource hub is a strong starting point.
Used well, hybrid working complements a good office. It certainly doesn't replace it.
Most growing businesses don't need to rip out their office and start again.
They need to take the noise problem seriously, try the free fixes first, and escalate when those run out.
Soft furnishings and a focus-hour agreement this month. Acoustic panels and a second meeting room next quarter. Glass partitions and pods when the team grows past the point where ad-hoc fixes can keep up.
The team feel you've built is one of the best things about a small business. You don't have to give it up to give people somewhere to think.
