03.17.2008
March Madness sinks productivity
You’ll hear this time of year referred to by many different names - Bracketology 101, The Big Dance and more commonly as March Madness. But if you’re a college basketball fan, the rest of this month amounts to three weeks of basketball bliss.
However, the annual basketball tournament is apparently taking a negative toll on workplace production.
Last year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., the nation’s oldest consulting firm, projected the cost to employers in lost productivity over the three weeks of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament exceeded $1.2 billion.
The first two days alone of the 2006 NCAA men’s basketball tournament cost employers around $260 million in wages paid to unproductive workers, according to the Chicago-based firm.
Add that to the $86 million lost each day due to workers spending an average of 13.5 minutes surfing sports Web sites and the lost profits add up quickly.
“It’s become the workplace tradition of our era,” said Chief executive officer of CGC Inc. John Challenger. “Unlike the Super Bowl or the World Series, you have the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that has 65 teams, so just about everyone in the office can find a team that represents where they’re from and track their progress.”
The fact that many of the games during the first two weeks of the tournament take place during the workday doesn’t help out workplace productivity either, according to Challenger.
While employees will visit sports Web sites like ESPN.com to download and print their basketball tournament brackets, the added element of streaming content and following games in real-time via the Internet can add to lost workplace productivity according to Challenger.
“In December 2007, Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online; and these weren’t low quality video feeds either,” Challenger said.
In response to the annual college basketball tournament, some employers have blocked their office’s computers access to sports-related Web sites. But according to a Challenger survey of 100 resource executives, only six percent of companies plan to go that route.
Other companies, however, are taking a different approach to the matter, according to Challenger.
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” Challenger said.
And that’s exactly what some employers are doing, capitalizing on the atmosphere in the office that the NCAA basketball tournament creates to build a little corporate camaraderie.
Some employers even encouraged their employees to wear their favorite college basketball team’s gear to work during the tournament, despite the obvious loss of workplace productivity.
“Employers ultimately have to make a decision on whether they will measure employees in terms of the quality of the work they do or solely on their productivity,” Challenger said.
Donathan Prater