Acoustic discomfort for tertiary-sector employees: issues and means of action for prevention.

The numerous tertiary-sector employees rarely exposed to damaging noise levels. However, they are subjected to equipment or conversation noise that inconveniences them, tires them, or distracts them. Such noise constitutes discomfort in the form of disturbance and annoyance that it is necessary to assess and then to reduce. To achieve this, various pieces of work have been initiated in France in recent years. In the absence of a regulatory framework, international and French standards are seeking to give guideline values both to company occupational safety and health (OSH) specialists, and also to open-plan characteristics are consistent with the work that is required of staff. The models for computing ambient sound are being ever-improved in order to assess solutions prior to design, or in order to capable of estimating conventional parameters (background noise, spatial decay, and reverberation time) and less conventional parameters (ambient noise, intelligibility, discretion) and to combine those data with surveys taken on employees. Recent studies have shown that the discomfort in terms of disturbance and annoyance is very much linked to the intelligibility of the noise, decrease in employee performance.