7/27/05
We all know about the positive ways in which the business world
has embraced fantasy football. Countless leagues are thriving in
offices throughout the country; major media and Internet players,
such as CBS, ESPN, and Yahoo market a vast array of services to
fantasy football enthusiasts; and countless independent operators
(ranging from league-hosting services such as RTSports.com to information
sources such as our very own FFToday.com) have sprung up alongside
the giants.
However, there is growing concern in corporate America that fantasy
football is a cancer in the workplace. According to some estimates,
the cost of fantasy football to American businesses exceeds the
very considerable revenue generated by the hobby. One of the most
widely cited estimates comes from the firm of Challenger, Gray,
and Christmas, Inc., whose CEO speculates that fantasy football
costs the nation’s employers $36,000,000 in lost productivity.
John A. Challenger points out that lost time isn’t only a
product of workers surfing fantasy sites for the latest updates
concerning their players, but of office socialization: “If
it is not the Internet, it could be 10 minutes of chatting around
the watercooler with other league aficionados. For every 10 minutes
an employee chats at the watercooler about the tournament, the company
is basically paying for unproductive worktime.”
Variously termed “cyberslacking” or “cyberloafing”
by workplace efficiency experts, the unauthorized use of Internet
access by employees at work supposedly costs companies $50,000,000,000
or more in lost productivity each year. I’m no efficiency
expert, so I have no idea how that number was arrived at. I dare
to suggest, however, that if all employees throughout the world
with Internet access stopped cyberslacking from August 1, 2005 through
August 1, 2006, it would be insane for us to expect fifty
billion dollars in goods and services simply to manifest themselves
as a direct result.
Cyberslacking happens, I suppose, because it can. If you have to
hire a company such as Stellar Internet Monitoring to find out which
of your employees are tinkering with their fantasy football lineups
on company time, that is probably because the ones who are spending
time on fantasy football at work are getting their work done just
as efficiently as (perhaps even more efficiently than) those who
aren’t.
According to the Society for Human Resources Management, wagering
on football is the most common form of gambling in the workplace.
Throw in workplace fantasy leagues in which only bragging rights
(and no entry fees) are at stake, and presumably the NFL becomes
an even bigger drain on company time in the estimate of some. But
as Lori
Kozlowski points out, “In some organizations even bosses
join in the pools, citing company morale as a reason for excusing
the action.”
I can’t help thinking of the brilliant scene in Office
Space in which our hero Peter Gibbon (Ron Livingston) recounts
an ordinary workday for “the two Bobs,” who are workplace
efficiency experts trying to cut labor costs in his office. Gibbon
begins by confessing, “I generally come in at least fifteen
minutes late. . . . [A]fter that I sorta space out for an hour.”
When asked by one of the Bobs what he means by “space out,”
he says, “Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like
I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too,
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes
of real, actual, work.”
I’m sure that circumstances vary from person to person and
from office to office, but I can’t help thinking that when
companies ban access to sporting sites to keep their employees productive,
the employees respond by going to other kinds of sites. When all
the “fun” sites are banned, the employees fill the gaps
in their workday by playing Tetris or using Excel to create the
most extraordinarily balanced checkbook of all time. If companies
take away every opportunity for the computer to be used as a source
of amusement, then I’m willing to bet that most employees
will respond the way Gibbon did, by “spacing out” for
a while—daydreaming or perhaps even catnapping if they can
get away with it.
I’ve had a representative sampling of jobs in the course of
my life—from flipping burgers as a teen to working at a utility
company and a law office in college to teaching at a number of different
colleges and universities as an adult. No matter where I’ve
worked, I’ve found that there were times when all the employees
had to pull together and focus to meet certain exigencies of the
marketplace in which we found ourselves. But I’ve also found
that there were slack times, times when the manager at Whataburger
would invent things for me to do or the lawyer I worked for would
give me papers to sift through just because he didn’t want
to send me home early or, most recently, when I have finished my
reading and my grading and am sitting in my office during office
hours waiting for students who might want to drop by to discuss
their papers or the latest reading assignments. Quite often, no
students drop by. I’m not sure how any productivity is lost
when I take advantage of such lulls in the workday to check the
standings in my fantasy league, but I’m sure there’s
a workplace efficiency expert out there somewhere who would be happy
to set me straight on that one.
Look, I’ll even turn the tables. I’ll talk about a college
student who disregarded the lectures of a professor to work on his
fantasy draft strategy during class (though he pretended to be taking
notes on his computer). I know about this not because he was a student
in my class, but because he is a rival in my fantasy league. The
strategy he developed was pointless because it was predicated on
different people making specific choices—and the whole thing
fell apart when one of our league buddies rocked the world of the
draft last season by taking Randy Moss with the second overall pick.
In other words, the time he “stole” from his accounting
class to work on his draft predictions turned out to be a complete
waste on draft day. But since he managed to get an A in the class
by studying the text instead of listening to the professor, I can’t
see why the professor in question would care.
Moreover, I don’t think we go far enough if we merely concede
that the instances in which fantasy football has a negative impact
on the workplace are few and far between. I think we can say that
fantasy football leagues can be (and quite routinely are) beneficial
to the workplaces in which they thrive. I contend that as a result
of fantasy football, workers get to know each other better, learn
each other’s thought processes better, and, as a result, do
their jobs better. Think back to the boss invoked by Kozlowski who
participates in football pools as a way of raising company morale.
Now we’re talking “intangibles,” a wonderful NFL
concept that translates beautifully to the workplace.
While preparing this column, I was contacted by one such boss as
Kozlowski describes, a branch manager for a major insurance company
who had this to say:
Fantasy Football can be a great boon for one's profession. With
only limited time spent at work, this hobby improves valuation and
negotiation skills. More and more it is a catalyst for ice-breaking
when marketing. And it opens up networking channels that were previously
untapped. It is simply a more efficient version of the same subject
matter that business people have been discussing at the watercooler
for decades.
I don’t expect a lot of feedback to my questions before the
football season begins, but I hope to hear back from people who
have experience managing other people (particularly in corporate
America) on the subject of fantasy football in the workplace. Is
it really the drain on productivity that some people make it out
to be? Is it less a morale booster than I imagine it to be? If you
are a worker without managerial experience, you may want to invite
your supervisor to respond to it. But I wouldn’t pull it up
on the screen at work. It might be safest to print out a copy at
home!
For responses to this fantasy question please email
Mike Davis. |
