Phone-Call Spillover in Open Offices: Soundproof Telephone Booths Separate Calls from Shared Work Areas

Why Phone Calls Are Especially Distracting

In an open-plan office, sales calls, client follow-ups, internal coordination, and video meetings can continue throughout the day. Unlike steady HVAC or equipment noise, speech contains recognizable words, changing tones, and pauses that naturally attract attention. Callers may also raise their voices to overcome background noise, allowing the conversation to reach more nearby workstations.

Nearby employees receive unrelated speech fragments, while the caller may struggle to hear clearly or discuss information discreetly. Headphones can help one listener, but they do not prevent phone-call spillover across the shared workspace.

A soundproof telephone booth is not intended to eliminate every source of office noise. It gives frequent calls a defined location away from individual desks. SpeX product documents specify noise reduction of up to 33.5 dB. This figure can describe the booth’s capacity to reduce sound transmission, but it should not be presented as reducing the entire office environment to 33.5 dB.

Match the Booth to the Calling Task

Frequent Short Calls

Sales follow-ups, online confirmations, and brief internal discussions generally suit a single-person office soundproof booth. SpeX One Max has external dimensions of 1000 × 1000 × 2265 mm and internal dimensions of 874 × 842 × 2045 mm. Project teams should place these measurements on the office floor plan and check door clearance, user access, and surrounding walkway width before confirming the location.

Compact external dimensions alone do not determine suitability. Buyers should also examine whether the task requires a laptop, note-taking space, charging access, or only a mobile phone.

Video Meetings and Longer Calls

The experience inside an enclosed office pod also depends on airflow, lighting, and power. One Max and One Plus each list a ventilation rate of 2.42 m³/min. Their documented configuration includes 4000K flicker-free lighting, one universal power socket, one USB Type-A port, and one USB Type-C port. These specifications support common calling and video-meeting equipment without relying on loose extension cables.

Ventilation figures should still be evaluated alongside expected call duration, daily frequency, room temperature, and local operating conditions. A booth used repeatedly for scheduled video meetings has a different workload from one used for occasional five-minute calls.

Base Quantity and Placement on Peak Call Demand

One soundproof booth for office use may not solve telephone disruption across an entire floor. Facility teams should identify the peak number of simultaneous calls, which departments make calls most frequently, and how far employees must walk to reach a booth. Average daily usage alone may hide periods when demand is concentrated.

A booth should be close enough to high-use teams to encourage adoption, but it should not obstruct emergency routes, main circulation paths, or active collaboration zones. If access is inconvenient, employees may continue answering calls at their desks even when a booth is available.

Use a Specification Checklist Before Purchasing

A practical comparison should include the stated noise-reduction value, external and internal dimensions, ventilation rate, lighting, power connections, and work-surface configuration. Product-document values should be kept separate from any measurements taken in the completed office because the surrounding layout and operating conditions are different.

Task-based specification helps a soundproof telephone booth separate calls from shared work without removing the collaborative character of an open office. The objective is a more controlled acoustic layout: calls have a suitable place, nearby employees face fewer speech interruptions, and the shared workspace remains available for everyday communication.