Should We Embrace the Brackets?
Like it or not, March Madness will distract many of your employees. So you might as well seize it as an opportunity to build camaraderie. That's the takeaway from this article in yesterday's USA Today:
A recent study by a job placement consulting firm suggests that while interest in the tournament might cost more than $1.5 billion in lost productivity, an organized office pool might ease that financial blow. Challenger, Gray & Christmas of Chicago estimated that workers spending 10 minutes a day talking about the tournament during its two-week run cost employers $1,525,500,000. That figure is based on an employee pool of more than 39 million earning an average of $15.56 an hour. "By having some type of organized and sanctioned event or pool, companies might actually reduce the overall disruption to the workday," says CEO John Challenger. "Companies that can leverage employee interest in the tournament ... are going to have a more loyal and productive workforce."A causal relationship between Tournament office pools and employee productivity and loyalty? I suspect that Challenger just made that up...but as a devoted bracketologist, I'm not going to argue.