Speech privacy is of extreme importance in any place of business. The lack of speech privacy can cause everything from employee job dissatisfaction, to leaks of vital company secrets! Your place of business should have a good level of speech privacy; otherwise you could be putting a lot in jeopardy.

If your place is business is bound by certain privacy laws, as in the case of establishments like health care facilities and educational facilities, higher levels of speech privacy must be maintained at all times. A leakage of information that is in violation of the law could cost your establishment a lot of money in fines.

Companies in which trade secrets are a vital part of business need a very high level of speech privacy. This might include tech companies, food manufacturers with top-secret recipes, drug manufacturers, and other businesses where trade secrets are vitally important.

Every company needs some level of speech privacy. Every company should worry about speech privacy, if only for the privacy of the personal conversations between employees. Your employees should feel safe talking to each other in order to keep their morale high. Additionally, excessive noise from speech can be distracting, causing employees to have lowered productivity and make more mistakes than normal.

There are four different levels of speech privacy. Confidential Privacy is the highest level of privacy on the Privacy Index (PI). This is a PI of 95% or better. Although speech can be detected, it can’t be understood.

Less than 10% of words and less than 5% of sentences can be understood intelligibly. Exam rooms, doctor’s offices, private meeting facilities, and any place where information must be protected should achieve this level of speech privacy.

Normal Privacy is the level with a PI of 80% to 95%. Speech can be understood, but only with significant effort. This is a big problem for many companies, and critical information could be accidentally leaked at this level.

Transitional Privacy has a PI of 60% to 80%. Most speech is understood relatively well, and can be seriously distracting for people who are trying to focus. In companies where information must be protected, or where concentration is important, this level of privacy is not acceptable.

No Privacy is the fourth level of speech privacy, with a PI of less than 60%. At this level, all speech can be understood clearly, and is extremely distracting. This level of privacy is absolutely unacceptable for any place of business, and would be distracting to employees, patients, visitors, customers, and clients.

In order to attain the highest level of speech privacy possible in your place of business, you should take steps to reduce noise in the workplace. Soundproofing may be too expensive for smaller companies, and does nothing to protect speech in common areas like reception areas, waiting rooms, and open office areas.

A good alternative is a sound masking system. Sound masking systems use white noise to mask speech by matching the frequencies of the human voice and other general office noises, making conversations must less intelligible. This is a very good solution for most business.