When I walk up to her and begin to talk, she stops, says “Wait, what?” and pulls her earphones out. To complicate matters, I sit in a small, private office so I have privacy during the day while she sits in a large room with employees all around her. Headphones and earbuds have of course become exponentially more popular at work as the so-called “open plan” office has spread. Thus, as others have observed, for people like your new hire, headphones are the new walls. As a practical matter, interrupting a colleague wearing headphones involves only slightly more effort than interrupting someone who is working without them.

Source: New York Times April 27, 2018 16:30 UTC