Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

What's a manager to do?

Every year when the college hoops postseason activities are about to begin, we get the usual assertions about how much it boosts the bottom line of the economy, and the opposite reaction of how it can be a huge loss in productivity for a business.

On the loss of productivity side, a recent estimate by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., an outplacement firm, says it could cost American companies up to $3.8 billion in loss of productivity, as well as wages.

With offices offering computer access to the Internet, it gets worse this year, as the deal by CBS (NYSE: CBS-A) for the rights to the games includes a ton of Web coverage, something that could had to more productivity problems. The first 56 games of the tourney (first three rounds) will be streamed on the Internet.

Executive vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Rick Cobb, says the estimate could be even on the low side. Cobb says the figures are based on actual time spent on Web sites alone, and doesn't include time that may be spent talking and interacting about games and their outcomes, which could raise the productivity and wage costs even more.

Other problems could be the extra strain on computer networks which could slow or come to a hault because of the bandwidth needed to stream online video.

Opposite Viewpoint

On the other hand, King Kaufman, who writes as a sports columnist for Salon.com, says that he thinks the reasoning is wrong concerning loss of productivity at work. His thinking is odd to me in that he asserts what is really happening is employees waste a lot of time each day, and are simply directing that time waste toward the tournament, rather than the usual surfing of the Internet or watching TV at their computer work stations.

I guess if you lower the bar that much, there is an arguement for what he says, but that does seem to a pretty cynical view of American workers, although in offices, that is probably the truth.

How to handle it

The truth is that workers will attempt to get around any restrictions placed on their March Madness activities, so it probably is better to find some middle ground, rather than play a cat and mouse game of trying to outwit each other between management and workers.

One suggestion Cobb gives is to have a designated area in the office where where workers can go to watch the games off and on, or to check how thier office pools are doing.

This of course will have its drawbacks as well, because there are always some workers who won't have any interest in the sporting event, and will feel the extra workload is being transferred unfairly to them. They may need to be offered an alternative, or number of alternatives to the sporting agenda.

In other words, this is something an office manager specifically - or other workplaces that workers could have access to games - needs to manage. Whether we like it or not it's here, and we can't afford to neglect it and let things get overly chaotic.