Your job is louder than it needs to be
Readtime: 3.5 minutes
I was at Primavera Sound music festival in Barcelona over the weekend. Seventy-thousand people, all there for the music. And a lot of them had Loop earplugs in.
At first it struck me as odd. You travel to Barcelona for the music – and then you put something in your ears to make it quieter.
But the clever thing about these earplugs is that they're not the old foam ones that turn the sound to mush. They filter it instead. They turn the whole thing down a notch and keep it clear, so you don't actually miss anything. You hear the same gig as everyone else. You just have less hearing damage doing it. Oh, and you can speak normally with whoever you're with too.
Pretty cool.
What's this got to do with work?
A lot of work feels like standing too close to the speakers.
The always-on job.
The group chats that never go quiet.
The open-plan office.
The full calendar.
We may like a lot of it, but it can be loud.
And that loudness comes with a cost.
You don't always feel it on the day. You feel it as tiredness the next morning, Sunday-night dread, or sometimes a short temper at home.
Loud environments don't feel like they're hurting you while you're standing in them. Which is exactly what makes them so easy to keep standing in.
You'd think turning the volume down would be the obvious move. But it doesn't usually feel that way, because turning things down at work feels like opting out. Like you'll miss something, or look less committed. We treat full exposure as the price of being serious about the work.
But the people at Primavera with earplugs in hadn't left. They were having the same night as everyone else, still hearing the music, still able to talk to whoever they were with, just without the cost.
Turning the volume down at work doesn't have to mean checking out or going off-grid. It can mean filtering the noise rather than blocking it out – keeping what matters and losing some of the parts that aren’t helpful.
So I've been asking where my own volume sits.
There's stuff I want at full volume. A coaching session, where I want to hear everything, including what the person isn't quite saying. Being immersed in delivering a leadership development session. The couple of hours I spend writing this newsletter each week.
And there's plenty I've turned down without losing much. How a LinkedIn post is doing in its first hour. The running scoreboard of who's building faster than me. The disappointment when something I'd been working towards didn't pay off. I had all of that at full volume for a while, and it didn't make the work any better. It just made the good stuff harder to hear.
There's a bigger question underneath all this.
The earplugs are a fix for a problem someone else created. The festival chose how loud to run the speakers. And the fact that thousands of people needed earplugs tells you the default was set too high.
Work is no different, except that no one really decided or designed it. It just kind of evolved. Badly, for many people.
And a lot of workplace wellbeing solutions only treat the symptoms. They're just earplugs. Useful, but they leave the volume exactly where it is.
So I think it's worth asking a different question. Not just what you'd turn down for yourself, but what's turned up that didn't need to be? And if you're senior, you're not only standing in the room, you're setting the volume for other people too.
Back at the festival, one person with earplugs in made the person next to them more likely to put a pair in. It’s the same at work, only stronger from the top. When a leader turns the volume down everyone below them gets a bit of permission to do the same. The more leaders who do it, the easier it becomes for everyone else.
Some of it has to be loud. But maybe not as much of it as we've got used to.
Where could you make work quieter - for yourself, or the people around you?
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If you’ve enjoyed this, I’d love to know. And even better, forward it on to someone else who might enjoy it too.