Life in the Blue

March is the best time of year. The weather warms up (it’s a balmy 70 in heart of the Missouri Valley today), the birds are singing, people are in a good mood, and it stays light well into the evening hours. I still believe in going on Spring Break and St. Patrick’s Day is a National Holiday. Finally, a nation wide sporting event second only to the Super Bowl provides all Americans with a popular past-time everyone can participate in. Just when everyone is in a good mood, corporate American finds a way to ruin it.

Every year during the first week of the NCAA basketball tournament, there will be a plethora of studies released saying “The NCAA Tournament costs employers several billion dollars or more in lost productivity.” Basically you can insert any number for the dollar value you want and someone will claim it’s true. The theory is that employees stop working to participate in (heaven forbid) something fun, such as an office bracket pool. The lost high quality work time will result in corporations being sent to the poor house because their employees can’t possibly handle a distraction at the office.

The phenomenon is strictly subscribed to by those in corporate America’s management. The following is just a sampling of headlines warning about the black hole of productivity that is the NCAA tournament. “Workers Take Break for NCAA Tournament”; “During NCAA Tourney, Bet on a Loss in Productivity”; “Chore a Bore, What’s the Score?”; “Will Tourney Hurt Businesses? You Bet”; “March Madness Fouls Out With Bosses”; “Madness Dunks Productivity”; and “NCAA Cuts Into Workers’ Output.”

So I get it. Every once in a while the enjoyment of life manages to sneak into the workplace and corrupt the cubicle walls that surround the working man’s 9-5 daily life. So what happens? In most cases, workers receive about the same liberty as 5-year-old who stole a cookie from the cookie jar.

For example, my sister (who knows about as much about basketball as I do about fashion) tried to access the site our friends use to enter their bracket. Upon doing so, her internet shut down and flashed ’site forbidden - work is for working.’ Forbidden? Wow, that’s pretty serious. My dad, who has worked for the same company for over 25 years cannot access any sites regarding sports during the tournament either. What does he do to combat this you may ask? Well, last year he though that it was so dumb that after 25 years he couldn’t even look up a box score that he sat in his car for the entire afternoon in the parking lot, listening to the broadcast on the radio. Now that’s lost productivity.

How they come up with their estimate is about as junk economics as in comes. In concocting this lost-productivity estimate, they don’t acknowledge that personal time is built into every workday. Workers routinely shop during office hours, take extended coffee breaks, talk to friends on the phone, enjoy long lunches, or gossip around the water cooler. It’s likely that NCAA tourney fans merely reallocate to the games the time they ordinarily waste elsewhere. Likewise, many office workers who don’t complete their tasks by the end of the day stay late or take work home.

Finally, the fear that millions of workers will waste time watching the games live for hours at the office is groundless. More than two-thirds of the games are played on weeknights or weekends, when very few employees are at work. In addition, there is plenty of evidence that people experience reduced interest as the tournament progresses, and are back to the daily grind not a day after it started.

So let’s get real here. Employees need to be happy. If your employees hate their jobs, your company will not be as successful. The lost productivity from disgruntled workers far out weights the lost productivity from someone looking up a box score online, or talking about the performance of the local squad in the tournament with co-workers around the water cooler.

And let’s keep this in perspective. In many European countries, workers miss basically the entire summer, sometimes they go home during the day for naps.

So just relax. You won’t lose a billion dollars, unless your employees go sit in their cars the entire afternoon. March is a happy time of year for all of us, and let’s keep it that way. Come Thursday evening this week, I plan to be sitting with the windows open, enjoying the spring time air, sipping on a cool Bud Lite, while the sound of Jim Nantz and Billy Packer bring a smile to my face…

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