Four Marches ago, I stood near my desk in a temporary Capitol Hill office with my head titled toward a TV on a filing cabinet. “Ellen” is just that good.
OK, it wasn’t “Ellen.” It was Butler and Old Dominion, a couple of scrappy college basketball programs, one a recent legend, settling the final score in an NCAA men’s basketball tournament game. The contest was tied. The seconds ticked. A Butler player drove toward the basket, stumbled, lobbed the ball skyward sort of like Rev. Oliver flipped his rifle to Gabriel in “The Patriot”; a teammate tapped the ball against the backboard; and another teammate scurried toward the rim, retrieved the ball, and laid it in to beat the buzzer. It was a five-second trip of insanity that makes March mad.
I am a Butler graduate. So of course I leapt into the air, fists and heart pumping, and sprinted down the hallway because there was nowhere to sprint inside the cramped office. Hopefully no senior staff was watching.
Accounting for postgame celebration time, I estimate that the 15-minute episode cost my employer about $4.45 of productivity. I, in the words of Andy Levy, apologize for nothing.
“This tournament and the betting and bracket-building that come with it are ingrained in the national fabric,” says John Challenger, the CEO of HR firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. Challenger’s organization has been calculating for years how much money the private sector wastes on employees distracted by March Madness, and this year the number clocks in at $1.9 billion. (He arrives at the figure by multiplying average hourly wages and the number of total workers who said they will spend at least one hour on March Madness activities during work hours.) But does that seemingly gaudy figure mean bosses should crack down on their staffs?
“Absolutely not.
“Any attempt to do so would most likely result in long-term damage to employee morale, loyalty and engagement that would far outweigh any short-term benefit to productivity,” Challenger adds.
Besides, it’s a leap to assume that the lost hours to work because of basketball would be fully productive otherwise. Some laborers may simply use their regularly scheduled break time to crunch bracket math or catch a few minutes of a game. Others may replace one reason for unproductive work with another; instead of being distracted by casual web browsing, their attention may turn to a live stream of a game. And I know more than a few people who use a sliver of paid vacation during tourney season. (Raises hand.)
“If anything, employers should embrace March Madness and seek ways to it as a tool to boost employee morale and engagement.”
