The startup's new open-plan office was designed to "foster collaboration." It had a polished concrete floor, exposed ductwork ceiling, glass partition walls, and 80 employees packed into 400 square meters with no acoustic treatment of any kind. Collaboration was indeed fostered — specifically, everyone was forced to collaborate by hearing every word everyone else said, whether they wanted to or not.

The sales team's cold calls reached the engineering team. The engineering team's debugging arguments reached the CEO. The CEO's confidential phone calls reached everyone. The D2,S (spatial decay rate) was effectively 0 dB per doubling of distance — sound did not get quieter as you moved away from its source because reflections from the hard ceiling kept the energy level constant throughout the space.

Employees developed coping mechanisms: noise-canceling headphones (defeating the purpose of open-plan), going to the bathroom to make phone calls, and typing increasingly aggressive messages in Slack to people sitting three meters away. Productivity dropped 23% in the first quarter.

Open offices need a minimum Speech Privacy Class (SPC) that requires absorptive ceilings, carpet or resilient flooring, and masking sound systems. Without these, speech propagates across the entire floor plate at conversational level.

The Moral: Open plan doesn't mean open acoustics. Measure RT60 and spatial decay with SonaVyx RT60 to quantify the privacy problem, then add ceiling treatment and masking to restore sanity.