The FrogDog team had a client once who felt the quiet in his office meant the imminent demise of his business. He declared his office a “morgue.”

He’d founded the company in the era of the boiler room, when everything happened via phone. Back in the day, his team prospected by phone, wrote new business by phone, and checked in with clients via phone. In his mind, a quiet office meant a business in which no business happened.

Though we now have a distributed workforce at FrogDog—so everyone creates the office he or she likes best for work on a given day—I can remember the in-office days when I could gauge the crew by the sound in the space.

To me, a quiet office felt like a productive office. In a quiet office—especially in a knowledge-work industry, like marketing—more work can get done. (Of course, people may just get a lot more on-line shopping done in quiet moments.) Yet when I heard boisterous banter, I figured social hour had arrived. Office-team socializing has importance, don’t get me wrong, yet I couldn’t call it “productive” in a billable-hour kind of way. Social hours and even the occasional social day? Great. A social week? A problem.

Which is better? A quiet office or a boisterous one?

Given that FrogDog provides professional services, I’ve had the opportunity to visit a lot of client offices. The predominance of workspaces I’ve visited have minimal or muffled sound. I can’t recall too many loud offices that didn’t have some element of industrial work, like manufacturing or packaging, underway.

Noise Level Doesn’t Equate to Productivity Level

Yet, though all of them have had more tranquility than noise, each entry in this assortment of offices didn’t exude the same level of corporate wellness.

Noise, I’d venture, has little to do with the health of a company.

I’ve walked many times into quiet offices and sensed universal malaise. However, the quietness doesn’t tip me off—the physical and situational demeanor of the people in the office does.

People in unhappy, unwell workplaces act standoffish. They seem constantly and vaguely exasperated. They have clandestine, small-group kvetch sessions in corners, whispering and rolling their eyes.

One office we visited regularly made me intensely uncomfortable, I could sense so strongly the discontent. Yet rarely did anyone say anything much about it to me, an outsider. (At least, not at first. And when they eventually did start making comments to me, I really knew the company had a problem.)

Happy offices, though equally quiet, have people who say hello, who come across as friendly and welcoming, and who smile spontaneously at each other. I could see people in happy offices, over the course of our visits, popping into colleagues’ offices for efficient yet pleasant little chats, all with relaxed and peppy body language. People in happy offices seemed to genuinely care about and enjoy the people with whom they worked.

The client who confused the advent of the e-mail era with impending doom? I wish he could have shadowed me for a few weeks, visiting different client offices. He’d then see the more telltale signs of an office’s sustainability: Happy people.

Over your career, can you describe your favorite office environment—and explain why you liked it so much?