Perception of the acoustic environment in the remote working setting during the lockdown

To reduce the spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working has become a common practice worldwide since the first lockdown period in Spring 2020, and is still in course. A number of positive effects were already known with respect to, e.g., increase in working performance and employee satisfaction. However, a compulsory and prolonged period spent to live and work from the home environment was never experienced before, thus long-term effects are still largely unexplored. In this study, 1934 employees from a university and from several large and small Italian companies answered to an online questionnaire on the perception of noise annoyance in the remote working environment. Besides the identification of people talking, moving, calling and listening to music as main source of noise disturbance, negative consequences of the acoustics of remote working were mainly related to a loss of concentration and to a difficulty in relaxing.