One of your coworker is noisy? Follow our guide on how to react with tact. After a post on coworking and love affairs, we pursue our own Managers’ guide to manners & coworking with an article dedicated to ensuring a peaceful ambiance in your coworking space.
Providing a calm working environment is one of the keys to your center’s success and reputation. But some of the coworkers might be noisier than some others, and thus threaten the fragile equilibrium which holds the community together.
Tactfulness, first try
The issue of a noise coworker is serious. It can become a burden, stain your center’s reputation and stop your other members from working. To avoid any “situation”, you can start by dedicating a closed room to phone calls. You should also impose the use of headsets for those who wish to work with their music on.
Respecting other coworkers
It is the most basic rule ever: a coworker’s freedom ends where another’s begins. Each member of your community should take into consideration their colleagues’ needs. Although a coworking space is meant to favor interaction, it can only work if everyone pays their respect to others.
A couple of solutions to make the noisy one quiet!
Humor is generally the best solution to obtain a little silence, but you can switch to a more formal reprimand if your jokes do not work.
- Tell him people will buy him a drink if he stops being so loud
- Send him a fake registered mail signed by the CPD — “Coworkers’ police department”
- Record him and then play the tapes for him. He will understand what you mean by “you are making hell a lot of noise!”
- Come up of a point system for noise: whenever he is loud, you take a point off.
- If he still cannot control himself, then you should tell the coworker more formally (and politely) that other members of the center expect him to be quieter.
Think about the office design and it could prevent the noise diffusion
You do not want a poorly laid out space. Some equipment is fundamental such as a conference room or a phone cabin. Do not forget to install a kitchen or a bar, which are the ideal places to discuss and phone. If you cannot or have not created such places then other solutions exist:
- If your coworking center is composed with several rooms, then you could establish a charter with different sound levels authorized from total silence to very loud brainstorming. It will help your coworkers’ productivity and create social cohesion.
- You can also gather your members by profession: commercials and communication agents will talk more easily and make a lot of noise, when more artistic professions will need calm to give the best of them.
- If you do not own a partitioned space, then you can create a regulation system according to daytime: silence is the morning and high volume tolerated after lunch…
