Does March Madness create some distraction in the workplace? Sure it does. Just like Christmas shopping season, Labor Day's 3-day weekend, and the Super Bowl. These cultural calendar events aren't happening live on CBSSports between 9am and 5 pm, so they don't get any press.
Where do these productivity loss numbers come from? Well, the LA Times estimated the 2012 tournament caused $1 billion in foregone output.
And as long as we are going two years back in the Wayback Machine, this Harvard Business Review post is a wonderful example of an academic who writes 600 words and doesn't ever tell you a damn thing.
Everyone else is reporting from the annual study by Challenger, Grey, and Christmas, which was predicting $134 million in lost productivity in the first two days of the 2013 tournament. Columbus Dispatch cites a figure of $1.2 billion per unproductive hour this year. Considering this is a three-week tournament, that's $140 billion in potentially "lost" productivity and wages. This seems high. Whatever, we'll accept it.
The US annual nominal GDP is in the neighborhood of $17 trillion. The "lost" money is 0.82% of our annual GDP. It's less than a rounding error.
What can't be attributed to a rounding error is the increase in camaraderie. Employers should welcome March Madness: it's an externally hosted and funded event with national 24-hour TV coverage that they can use to perk up morale. It's office appropriate and nothing foul to object to. Few, if any, big businesses are savvy enough to take advantage of this slam dunk. They could easily guard those three points of morale instead of letting it dribble away. This is a major missed opportunity "overtime". (OK, enough bad basketball puns, I'll go away now.)
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| Sports: A socially acceptable time for upset grown men to stand in public and make farmyard sounds as loudly as possible. |
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