Choosing the Best Headphones for Your Secretarial Staff

When choosing office supplies and electronic equipment for your staff, you should balance cost, quality, and comfort. A great example is shopping for headsets for your secretarial staff. Taking a lesson from the answering service industry, cheap headsets will not do because everything about then from the microphone to the cord are poorly manufactured. Your customers will have second thoughts about doing business with you when they speak to your staff and your office''s end of the call is full of static and feedback. Many companies try to save money by purchasing whatever headset is most inexpensive and figure they''re getting a great deal. Instead of saving the company money, these "value brand" headsets end up costing many times more than they were expected to save.

A lot has happened with headset technology in the past ten or fifteen years. Noise canceling technology was at one time prohibitively costly for most businesses to use in their headsets, but now this is not the case. What most people have found is that by spending slightly more for a quality headset, they are able to consistently provide above average service quality. This is very helpful considering that most secretarial staff work in close quarters and background noise isn''t a possibility but instead a given. Cubicle walls or some other physical noise-absorbing partition can go far in cutting down on spillover noise, but noise-cancelling headsets really help to cut down on the amount of unwanted sound that can remain. As a result, the people the headset users are calling may not even be aware of anyone else in the room.

In the past, companies have used cubicles and other furniture systems to cut down on noise between secretarial staff. Although this was and continues to be a great way of cutting down on noise, putting walls between people and cutting them off from the rest of the office can sometimes have the effect of inducing claustrophobia. For this reason it is advised that any partitions you build on your office floor are well thought out and executed. Before you write off cubicles entirely, you should consider that they do have a lot of positive attributes. For example, a number of people prefer to work in more private quarters instead of out in the open. Other people find that there are a lot less distractions when in a cubicle and they get more work done.

The main point of all this is that there is no one universal solution that will work for every company and their secretarial staff. Choosing the best headsets for your office means considering many aspects such as what material they are made out of, how much they cost, and how comfortable they are when used for long periods of time. It also requires you to evaluate how well your office layout is working and whether you should invest in new furniture. Like many other decisions you will have to make for your office, there are a number of other factors you might not immediately consider. These are the sorts of things that will allow you to operate better or cause a lot of aggravation.

How good a headset is continues to be a subjective thing because with any number of people you will find a number of preferences. Some prefer small, compact headsets that have just one earphone and a discreet microphone while others would like headsets that have two larger and more comfortable earphones and a boom microphone. Some people, especially those who don''t make as many phone calls, would prefer to use a regular telephone headset and not something they wear on their head.