Ah, March Madness, the time of the year eagerly anticipated by college basketball fans; the entire college basketball season summed up in 63 hard-hitting, excitement- filled games. But, what may be the ultimate dream for basketball fans has been turning into a huge headache for employers and computer network administrators.
A number of things contribute to the March Madness problem, not the least of which is that CBS Sports is broadcasting all of the playoff games live over the Internet. Basketball junkies need not miss any of the action simply because they have to do that pesky chore known as “go to work.” If they’ve got a computer at work, then they’ve got game; all of the games. While many employers might frown on employees bringing television sets to work so that they can be paid to keep up with their favorite teams, what are they supposed to do about employees tucked away in cubicles watching the game on their computer?
Even the most un-savvy computer-using employee usually knows how to minimize and hide a website window, allowing a word processor or other office productivity program to fill the screen when “The Boss” enters the office. This makes the employee appear to be doing what they are being paid to do. The Boss thinks that his employees are being good, diligent workers, when they are actually surfing the Internet or playing Solitaire. I know of some offices where this practice is rampant.
Special “boss key” programs can also be installed to make slacking at work even easier. An ad for one boss key program reads in part, “Allows you to hide an active program window immediately using a hot key! You can hide browser windows, folder windows, application windows, all your desktop icons and taskbar when your boss or anyone else you don’t want to see your screen comes in. Its speed is brought to maximum to allow you react as quickly as possible to any threat that appears.” Even the sound can be muted, so that the boss won’t hear screaming sports fans in the background while you are ostensibly typing a company letter. What could be easier?
The computer security experts at Websense state that “a 31 percent increase in the number of sports-related Web sites and a 56 percent increase in the number of gambling-related Web sites compared to a year ago leads to a decrease in employee productivity, network bandwidth and computer security.” It doesn’t take too many workers watching live basketball games on their computers to clog up a company’s network, seriously slowing things down for everybody. Add to that the many thousands of gambling and sports-related websites that are designed to infect visiting computers with viruses and spyware, and the situation gets even worse.
Websense also figures that U.S. employees spend an average of 13.5 minutes per day on college basketball websites. From what I’ve seen in offices around town, that time estimate is quite low. But, at even 13.5 minutes per day, 58.5 million college basketball fans times the average American hourly wage equals $3.7 billion, spread out over the 16 basketball tournament days.
A way of turning March Madness lemons into lemonade is offered, however. Websense suggests “companies should try to find a way to take advantage of employees’ excitement over the tournament. This may not only help build morale, but it may also help the company control the amount of productivity lost. Additionally, office pools may have other benefits, such as bringing together workers who might not have interacted otherwise. This helps with team building, which leads to greater performance in many areas of business.”
I think that maybe companies should simply give employees time off to watch the games. That way, at least they wouldn’t have to pay guys like me to fix their infected computers and wrecked networks. Oh, whatever.