More offices are allowing employees to play DJ
Studies have found that listening to music can make workers more productive
The speakers never stop pumping music throughout the office at Codeword, a public relations agency in Manhattan. All day. Every day. Any song by any artist can play for the entire office at any time. In theory, at least, death metal, Gregorian chants or Enya can fill the office before the 40 employees have finished their coffee.
Everyone is also empowered to skip a disliked song by using the app that controls the office’s Sonos speaker system. The rule — “Claim your song skipping,” meaning the person who vetoes a song should publicly acknowledge doing so — is stipulated in Codeword’s “10 Commandments of Sonos,” which are printed on a poster that hangs on a wall in the corner. The sixth and seventh commandments encourage “deep cuts” and introducing colleagues to “weird music,” while the eighth cautions against taking things too far: “Extreme genres,” the poster warns, “might not last long.”
On a recent Thursday afternoon at Codeword, Depeche Mode played over the speakers. A few employees were wearing headphones, opting out of the sonic community. “I have come to like it, but I hated it at first,” said Mike Barish, a senior editor at the agency. “To me, it seemed like trying too hard, like very lazily creating culture.”
The rise of the open-floor-plan office has exposed workers to many annoying habits that used to hide behind cubicle walls, from distracting personal phone calls to weird food smells. Now, at least within an emerging vanguard of musicfriendly offices, add coworkers’ musical preferences to that list.
“We’re getting a nice segment of commercial businesses installing Sonos,” said Brad Duea, the managing director of the Americas at Sonos Inc., which manufactures a popular line of wireless speakers. The company doesn’t track how many offices use its system but claims it often receives feedback on Twitter from office workers.
The thousands of dealers that do custom speaker installations have also reported more requests for office jobs. Mattress-startup Casper, Seattle-based marketing firm Firmani + Associates, and Brooklyn-based PR agency Praytell all have speakers that play music throughout the office during the workday. Sonos also plays music aloud in each of its three corporate offices.
The role of music at work is part of an unintentional arms race of sorts. Office workers embraced earbuds and noise-canceling headphones in large numbers as ways to cope with the lack of privacy that came with the open-floor plan. But using private music to restore some semblance of auditory personal space defeats the purpose of taking down cubicle walls, which was done in the name of company culture and collaboration.
Hermits don’t make very good corporate citizens of the modern office. That’s where the shared Wi-Fi-enabled speaker enters corporate life. Music gets workers to take off their headphones while creating at least the veneer of corporate culture.
Neil Parikh, Casper’s chief operating officer, makes a playlist of “pump up jams” to play before the weekly allhands meeting on Mondays. Some past musical selections have included “Eye of the Tiger” and “Sweet Dreams.” (Get it? It’s a sleep pun.)
Studies have also found that listening to music can, under the right circumstances, make workers more productive. In one, a group of information technologists who listened to music while working completed tasks more quickly, came up with better ideas, and reported better moods. That study also found that letting people pick their own music and listen for as long as they wanted led to the best results.