With the beginning of the NFL football season just a few weeks away, it’s no surprise that the topic of worker productivity and fantasy football is on the front burner again. According to the Indianapolis Business Journal (and home to the Colts, arguably some of the most ardent football fans), 37 million people spend at least 1 hour a week managing their teams, costing employers on average of $1.1 billion dollars a week in lost productivity during the football season.
This tends to put companies in a quandary: do they monitor and crackdown on such activity in hopes of increasing productivity while at the same time affecting employee morale? Or do they sit idly by while their employees spend hours on end managing and carrying on conversations about the merits of trading a particular player? There does not appear to be any clear answer to this common situation, but as long as the work gets done and the employees get to check their rosters, it appears to be a compromise by company and employee can live with during the football season.
2 Responses
Peter
August 17th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
1That challenger study is mostly bogus. It calculates time spent on fantasy football and assumes its done during work, when it could be during legitimate breaks or even after work. They’re terrible with their methodology and just try to get attention … just like their NCAA bracket study and others. But the media just love grabbing those headlines without digging any deeper.
And the FSTA.org surveys show fantasy sports is actually a very positive force in the workplace. Very little investigation by the reporter on that. It’s bad journalism to just introduce the counterpoint in the last graph.
Jim Nguyen
September 7th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
2I’ve seen estimates for fantasy players in the US anywhere from 12 million to 25 million and the costs to employers be an even bigger range. I’d like to see a better, more in-depth study.
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