How Do I Maintain Privacy?

While we have been working from home we’ve been working for the majority of or time in isolation, we’ve been able to control our workspace and we’ve been able to control our privacy.

To some degree we will want to replicate that when we return to the work­place. Privacy doesn’t mean isolation, it means reducing distractions because distractions generate stress, and stress destroys positive moods and thoughts.

Privacy is generally associated with an enclosure but to ensure we don’t create individual silos we need to think about having different levels of privacy.  We can control privacy through furniture. When we think about different levels of privacy — visual or acoustic?

Visual privacy means we don’t want people distracting our eyesight, taking our eyes away from either a book we are reading or a screen that we are working on. Providing this barrier stops the visual distraction that will enable us to have the correct level of privacy we require.

Then there’s acoustic privacy, we don’t want to overhear other people’s conversations, or in most instances, we don’t want to be overheard ourselves.

 A lot of this we can do with our voice, the change of our tone to suit the environment, but this isn’t always appropriate. Increasing an environments acoustic property whether they’re a permanent fixture built within the environment or retrofitted the key way reduce reverberation is through fabric.

In either circumstance furniture can help support concentration and focus by having these different means of privacy control at our disposal.

Written by Adrian Campbell

Workplace Consultant of The Senator Group

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