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The specter of silence in the workplace

Every now and again, the massive A/C unit that pumps cold air throughout my colleagues’ workspaces shuts down. With its deafening hum silenced, the workplace becomes scarily quiet. Every sniffle, every snuffle, every cough and sneeze, every laugh and every sigh can be heard across the cubicle jungle. In the silence, we’re exposed. With a collective tide of irrational paranoia sweeping across the workplace, coworkers become afraid that the silence will bring added scrutiny. In short, although silence may not paralyze the workplace altogether—in fact, common sense seems to tell us that it may engender a more efficient workforce—it can, as U.S. News and World Report contributor Andrew Rosen recently noted, stifle not only open communication, but creativity and teamwork.

Specifically, Rosen highlights six main points, each describing why a quiet office is, as he puts it, “bad news.”

  1. “Quiet effectively kills open communication.” As I describe above, silence can be stifling—creating an uncomfortable environment in which every individual is afraid to break the silence. Or, as Rosen rightly observes, “Being reduced to whispering is childish and stepping behind closed doors creates a climate of secrecy and suspicion, even fueling paranoia.”
  2. “A silent office makes people self-conscious.” Breaking silence can bring potentially unwanted attention, allowing others to easily identify you as the source of even the most inaudible sound. “Knowing you have an unintended audience can change the way you communicate,” says Rosen.
  3. “We email people six feet away.” Although I regularly condemn this practice, emailing a person who is six feet away, or even next to me is something of which I have been guilty on countless occasions. Today’s workers seem to be increasingly antisocial because we tend to choose virtual means of communication over true interpersonal contact and communication. Silence drives people even further into their virtual world, by making us even less likely to speak face-to-face.
  4. “You can’t listen to music.” I firmly understand the benefits of listening to music while working—music, whether jazz, post-rock, metal, or hard rock, helps me to focus and allows my “creative juices” to flow. Even if your office allows you to play your music, it is my feeling any music pumping in your cubicle should be pumping through headphones.
  5. It kills creativity. Creativity and innovation are often the result of minds working together in a dialectical fashion, with various persons working together to reach a common, collective truth. “A quiet work environment fosters a lack of spontaneity, creating somber and depressing working conditions,” notes Rosen.
  6. “There is no team.” It stands to reason that if silence inhibits the open flow of communication, it could bring the gears of teamwork to a screeching halt. Encapsulating this idea in a truism, Rosen suggests, “Solitude is best friends with isolation.”

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