When a room’s transparent glass walls make teleconferencing difficult but work well for when the space serves as a workstation for guests, what’s an office to do?
Location: Singapore
Summary
During teleconferencing in the room, users on the other end of the line —which include the company’s clients — would complain about a distracting noise in the call.
To improve the audio quality, people in the room would speak slowly and directly into the microphone. But despite their well-intent efforts, they would still receive complaints about the poor call quality.
The room, which allows a maximum of three people at a time, functions as a workstation for guests, a meeting room and teleconference room. Its layout consists of:
A workstation table, chair and small coffee table
A glass partition with glass swing doors
A glass whiteboard for meeting notes
Ceiling grid sound absorption tiles with carpet flooring
Two walls with sound absorption panels
The Challenge
What's good is that the room had sound absorptive materials, and itsoverall reverberation was in line with other offices that have a typical setup.
But the problem lay with the two glass walls parallel to each other. The whiteboard and the partition with swing doors allowed lateral reflections and flutter echoes — the culprits behind the disruptive audio call noise.
The Solution
Normally, we can just add a sound-absorbing material like heavy curtains to one of the glass surfaces to solve the problem.
But our clients wanted to keep the glass partition transparent and still have a place to write on the wall. So we came up with the solution to place sound absorption panels on the top and bottom of the whiteboard instead.
It not only minimised the noise but led to a far more pleasing teleconferencing environment without the need to upgrade or change any part of the audio equipment.