The results in this study seem to suggest that those who are heavy multi-taskers actually perform worse on a test of tasks-switching ability, which could have to do with a reduced ability to filter out interference.

But how does this actually sit with what we know about music listening at work? Is it true that music listening while working could be detrimental, and that such ‘multi-tasking’ behaviour should not be encouraged in workplaces?

It is certainly true that employees can find music distracting, and feel that it hinders their task performance. However, many employees find music beneficial to their concentration. So what factors could influence whether music is perceived as distracting or not? It could be due to a number of different factors, as participants in my studies indicated:

Musical structure. More complex musical structure could be more distracting. This means that it is not necessarily instrumental vs vocal music that influences whether music is distracting or not, but rather how the music is constructed.

Lyrics. Of course, lyrics could be distracting. Especially if they trigger thoughts and associations, although this does not happen with all lyrics do.

Musical training. Those with musical training may be more likely to listen more closely to the musical structure, timbre, rhythm and so on.

Other associations. For example, some employees associate music with leisure, rather than with work, and could therefore get distracted.

Previous listening habits. This is a very important factor. If employees are used to listening to music while working, they will feel less distracted. And vice versa.

Work-related interruptions. When employees are at work, work-related tasks and conversations are most often prioritised, whereas the music is subordinate. This is quite obvious, as employees are in the office to work – not to listen to music. So when work-related interruptions occur, music can become distracting. However, it is also worth noticing how many listeners at work also – on the other hand – use music to manage interruptions at work!

Task complexity. If an employee is unfamiliar with the task, they are more likely to perceive the music as distracting. This is of course very individual!

Sense of control. When employees are forced to listen to music, the music will often feel distracting and annoying. When employees can decide for themselves if they want to listen, and if so – how and to what, they are more likely to find music beneficial.

These are just some of the many factors that seem to play a part in whether music listening can be distracting or not. It is tempting to try and simplify arguments and nail down quick explanations, such as “instrumental/classical music is better for concentration than vocal/pop music”. However, we need to resist such quick analyses, and instead look also at the whole context in which the listening takes place. It is interesting to note that many laboratory-based studies of the effects of music on task performance find distracting effects, and that the researchers often seem to choose the music for the participants – without even reflecting on the matter. Would the results look different if the participants could choose the music they wanted?

For more literature on music and the effects of self-selection and control:

Batt-Rawden, K., & DeNora, T. (2005). Music and informal learning in everyday life. Music Education Research, 7(3), 289-304.

Burns, J., Labbé, E., Williams, K., & McCall, J. (1999). Perceived and physiological indicators of relaxation: as different as Mozart and Alice in Chains. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 24(3), 197- 202.

Greasley, A. E. (2008). Engagement with music in everyday life: an in-depth study ofadults’ musical preferences and listening behaviours. PhD thesis, Keele University, Stoke-on-Trent.

MacDonald, R. (2006). An investigation of the effects of post-operative music listening in hospital settings. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, University of Bologna, Italy, 22-26 August.

Mitchell, L. A., MacDonald, R. A. R., & Brodie, E. E. (2006). A comparison of the effects of preferred music, arithmetic and humour on cold pressor pain. European Journal of Pain, 10(4), 343-351.

• Short-term stress-related absences topped 42,000 in the three months to December last year.
• Of the 593,930 people claiming the Employment and Support Allowance, 234,670 (39%) are doing so for mental and behavioural disorders.

Another survey showed that:

• stress is the second biggest cause of short term absences
• stress is one of the leading cause of all long-term absences for non-manual workers

This also has a very real and clear financial impact on organisations and their budgets, as stress at work costs the UK economy 10% of the total GDP every year. These figures are likely to rise further, as recent figures from the Trade Union Congress (TUC) suggest that stress related illness is on the rise in the UK due to spending cuts in the public sector.

Even though listening to music at work will not solve all these problems, there is a high incidence of music listening in the workplace and results show that stress-relief is one of the major functions of music at work. Therefore, it is worth examining this in more detail.

Listening to music at work is often viewed as an activity that helps to regulate and improve mood. Many of the respondents in my survey mentioned that music listening had stress- reducing functions (using descriptions like “it relaxes me”, “calms me down”, “eases stress”, and “soothing”).

For some people, music was experienced as cathartic and provided stress relief through representing negative affect in a public environment where acting out the experience was not deemed suitable;

Lets me think, allows me to chill and unwind, if it’s a punky song I can imagine all my stresses being screamed out with the song even if I’m not screaming along with it. (202, F: 18-25yrs, Administrative Assistant)

Statistical results from the survey showed that stress was positively significantly related to whether participants agreed that music could help them relax, which confirms that music can have relaxing functions at work – particularly if the participants are stressed at work.

The reports of mood improvement, relaxation and stress reduction can be understood as well-being related experiences. Given that people are more likely to report high subjective well-being if they experience positive affect more often (Diener & Lucas, 2000), this could be a route through which music listening can influence employee well- being. In other words, music can create a sense of well-being in offices, through providing frequent experiences of positive mood.

There is also another perspective on the way in which music at work can improve well-being. Being able to manage distractions is associated with a sense of relaxation, and having to listen to imposed music and getting distracted is perceived as annoying and stressful.

Researchers argue that there is no real difference between which sounds are perceived as music and which as noise, but that the main characteristic is that the event is out of the listener’s control. This becomes important to music listeners in work settings. Music provides a sense of control over mood and environments, and this experience is an important aspect of stress relief. Other studies have also found that control is a particularly important aspect of wellbeing. In organisational psychology, it is recognised that control is one of the determinants of well-being at work (Warr, 1999). Furthermore, control has been identified as influential in research on music preference and pain control (Mitchell et al., 2006), and post-operative care (MacDonald, 2006), as well as in studies of music listening and well-being in daily life (Batt-Rawden & DeNora, 2005).

Office noise can have a negative impact on productivity, reduce job satisfaction, increase dislike for the office environment, and even cause medical symptoms (see review in North & Hargreaves 2008). Office noise also increases stress, and the negative effects are made worse when people believe they have no control over it, or when they are not used to it previously (ibid). It is therefore not surprising to find that employees value music listening, as it is often used to minimise office noise. But the negative effects of office noise should also be of interest to managers, given that it can produce stress.

Given that music gives employees an opportunity to manage unwanted office noise, it is clear that having this opportunity can also reduce stress and other negative effects of office noise.

1. Relaxation: “calms me down”, “eases stress”, “soothing”
2. Concentration: “improves my ability to focus on what I am working on”
3. Affect management: “helps me to remain positive”
4. Block out distractions: “helps me concentrate, especially when someone else is in the office, or talking on the phone, or having a meeting in my office”
5. Create variation: “I couldn’t work without it. It would just be a nightmare. Too tedious a job, inputting all day.”
6. Helps to think about something else: “If music was not my distraction, then something else would be, i.e. something unproductive such as fiddling with papers or gazing out of the window”
7. For entertainment: “It keeps me company when there isn’t anyone else around”
8. Because they enjoy it: “I feel more comfortable, it makes things more enjoyable, therefore I feel better about doing it, I guess. I suppose, in a nutshell, I just like it.”
9. Makes time go quicker: “it just helps the day to go on. It would be a long day without it.”
10. Lifts energy: “I feel a physical feeling of almost elation.”

Source: Haake, A.B. (2011) Individual music listening in workplace settings: an exploratory survey of offices in the UK. Musicae Scientiae, 15 (1)

1. Avoiding boredom

Many music listening employees find that music gives them something else to think about. It provides a diversion and prevents employees from engaging in other distracting behaviours. In this way, music is a strategy to manage internal interruptions, such as day dreams or other thoughts – which could lead to a loss of work flow which could lead to the employee starting to do something else (fiddling with papers, browsing the internet, find a colleague to chat to, send some e-mails and so on).

2. Avoiding interruptions

One frequently mentioned function of music at work is to manage interruptions, and through this function music can also help to improve task concentration. Being able to manage interruptions is by employees described as a way to cope with stress, through having control over the auditory environment. Headphones in particular help to improve concentration in two ways:

a)   Blocking other sounds: Employees often use headphones to block out surrounding noise from the environment or other colleagues by using headphones.

b)   Signalling withdrawal to colleagues: Employees also use headphones to send a visual ‘do not disturb’ signal to others.

3. Allowing employees a sense of control and identity marking

There is a wealth of research indicating that lack of control can induce stress at work. For example, noise at work can negatively impact on both physical and psychological well-being (North & Hargreaves 2008). When people can choose what to hear at work, they find it more relaxing and their work becomes more productive.  Music listening is also strongly connected to identity display, and the workplace is no exception. Lack of opportunities to display personal distinctiveness in offices can undermine self-identity (Baldry, 1997; Elsbach, 2003), and music may therefore be particularly important in open-plan workspaces as a means for employees to assert their identities.

4. Combating work stress

Work-related stress is related to ill-health (Donald et al., 2005; Smith, 2001) and stress in the workplace can also reduce productivity, in particular when stress manifests itself as a reduction in psychological well-being (Donald et al., 2005). This also has a very real and clear financial impact on organisations and their budgets. A mental health charity (Mind) estimated in 2005 that stress at work costs the economy £100 bn every year in the UK. One hundred billion. E v e r y  y e a r. It equals about 10% of the total GDP in the UK. That is an awful lot of money to pay for the consequences of employee stress. Especially today, when there are major issues with the economy in several countries – not only UK, but most Western countries. Can we really afford to lose that amount of money from the economy? To make matters worse, recent figures from the Trade Union Congress (TUC) suggest that stress related illness is on the rise due to spending cuts in the public sector.

The Mind charity report in 2005 identified the following stress-inducing factors:

• poor working conditions, including shift work, long hours, travel, noise, smells, lighting, work overload and work underload;
• an unclear role in the organisation, including ill-defined expectations, conflicting priorities, role conflict and responsibility for others;
• personality factors, including a tendency towards anxiety, or a disposition that is unsuited to the type of work – for example extrovert people may find a socially isolated job more stressful than introverts;
• poor relationships at work, including low levels of trust, lack of supportiveness and inadequate opportunities to explain problems to someone who will listen.

It is obvious that simply allowing employees to listen to music (or even worse – forcing employees to listen) will not solve the whole problem. But there are some of the factors that I feel are clearly related to music, and/or that music can influence.

- Poor working conditions: noise, work overload, and work underload

Music is often used at work to manage noise and interruptions. It is also often used to manage work overload. Through this function, music listening at work can create breaks and relaxation during the working day, as well as providing a sense of control, which in itself is stress relieving. Music is also a strategy to manage work underload, through distraction from day dreams and other boredom-related behaviour.

- Personality factors

Music listening at work is for many people an accompaniment, which could be particularly suitable for extravert people who work in a socially isolated job. Equally, an introvert person may find the interruptions in a shared working environment difficult to cope with, and could therefore find self-selected music useful to reduce interruptions in the workplace.

Conclusion

Music can have many positive functions at work, and these functions can counteract common stress triggers in the workplace. Viewed from this perspective, managers should conceptualise music at work as more than simply a fluffy ‘leisure activity’ at work. Instead, music listening at work can ultimately help organisations and companies to save money on working days lost due to stress-related illness.

“Are we allowed to listen to music at work?”

“Do we have to pay license fees for having music on in the office?”

“What if people download music illegally, or spread viruses on the company network?”

These concerns points to the fact that very few workplaces have any clearly defined policies on music listening. Often, it is down to individual managers. Some allow music, some don’t. Some employees do as they are told, some don’t.

In my research, music was often viewed as something “private”, “individual” and “leisure-related”. Yet, it was also often viewed as functional and useful for work. Music as representing leisure (or private life) was met with mixed emotions in my studies. Some interpreted music as leisure as a sign of a liberal and positive approach of the company, and felt it represented an attempt by the company to distance itself from a traditional and controlling (Taylorist) approach to the relationship between managers and workers. Others, who viewed work mainly as a drive for efficiency, felt music listening at work signified laziness and unavailability. The fact that music sometimes evokes guilt (some felt “naughty” for listening to music at work) suggests that there may be clear boundaries between work and leisure, that the existence of music blurs these boundaries, and that some people found this problematic.

If leisure and work are considered as two separate entities (in the industrialised sense), then defining music as leisure at work can be a way to undermine employees’ private habits, by defining music as something that does not belong at work (i.e. music is not compatible with work). But if leisure and work are viewed as more integrated, then music as leisure at work can be viewed as a compliment to work, and as a way to structure and manage the work environment as well as the individual in that environment.

Understanding more about the effects of music in workplaces, and the different associations it may evoke, is useful for organisations.  It can help companies developing policies that clarify what is accepted music listening and what is not, which means employees know how to behave without being worried about doing something they shouldn’t.

New technology has made it easier to listen to your own music at work. Many employees have access to music in their offices through MP3-players and via the internet, whereas in the past employers had more control over what music (if any) to broadcast to everyone, for example in factories. “This change in music access at work, and the fact that employees today can choose their own individual music at any time, was what made me decide to look into the effects of music in offices”, said Dr Anneli B. Haake who conducted the study at University of Sheffield, UK.

However, the survey found that having music playing in the office had its drawbacks too. Loud music can irritate co-workers and headphones can isolate listeners from their team. “The most important thing is to have control over the music”, said Dr Haake. “If music is forced upon people, the music can be irritating and annoying, and we know from research that office noise can have severe negative effects on employee health, well-being and productivity. But when employees can have control over when, where and what to listen to, music can clearly bring about real benefits to individual employees, and ultimately to the company.”

“One really interesting thing for me was the way that listeners seemed to balance their individual music needs with the demands in the workplace”, said Dr Haake. “People were really careful about not disturbing each other, or appearing unprofessional in front of clients – or at least that’s what they told me!”.

The research suggests that companies who want a happier, more productive staff might do well to invest in a library of CDs, or other music listening solutions. “There are several options for music listening at work today, and many software solutions allow constructing and sharing of playlists”, said Dr Haake. “We know that listening to your own music makes people happy – and a happy worker is likely to be a more productive one”.

You can read the full article here.