March madness and the workplace; then on to baseball
Just the other day, I whined a bit about the lack of original local journalism in major newspapers, as they often just kick around the same syndicated stories with different headlines
Wouldn’t you know it, today in my local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there’s a rather lengthy original story on a burning workplace issue this time of year: office basketball pools.
The pervasiveness of these contests, which generally involve a small entry fee, has prompted studies to determine the amount of money gambled, loss of office productivity and number of businesses that bar them.
Some scintillating facts and figures:
The FBI has estimated that of $3.5 billion wagered on the NCAA Tournament annually, about half comes through office pools and similar contests. An NCAA survey determined that 10.7 percent of Americans take part in tournament pools. The estimate on legal tournament wagers in Las Vegas is $80 million. . . .
A study by the Society for Human Resource Management determined in 2002 that 71 percent of companies either allowed or didn’t concern themselves with pools while the rest banned them. But although most companies don’t have an outright ban, people are still nervous about acknowledging the pools’ existence.
Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc. calculates annually the dollar amount businesses lose to bracketology. Including time used to pick winners, watch games on TVs and computers, and brag and moan around the water cooler, this year’s estimate is $889.6 million.
Well, before anyone gets too excited about all that wasted productivity, how about calculating the offset in employee morale and retention from working in a workplace that looks the other way on such a commonplace activity and allows people to have a little fun once in a while?
Here’s the story: ” ‘Bracketology’ means net loss of work at office” by Stu Durando
Don’t forget to look at the photo captioned: “Workers Sunday place school names on a six-story, 72-by-48-foot NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament bracket Sunday in St. Louis.”
Now the baseball story (here in St. Louis — the world’s best baseball town notwithstanding the embarrassing result of last year’s World Series — we will go right from NCAA finals to Cardinals opening-day)
Diane M. Pfadenhauer at Strategic HR Lawyer had this recent post:
Diane has some interesting observations on different kinds of teamwork. She cites a New York Times article on the performance of groups under pressure, comparing “decentralized” groups such as the New York Yankees with “strongly connected” ones such as the Boston Red Sox. Comments that caught Diane’s attention included this one:
Social scientists who have studied group performance under pressure say that often it is decentralized groups that prove more resilient than strongly connected ones; they are better able to weather outside criticism and internal quarrels.
I certainly heard such things about military organizations. Somewhere I once read about the success of the American military over the Germans and Japanese in WWII being attributable in part to unit leadership being relatively weak.
In the sense that when official leaders (i.e. commanding officers) were killed or incapacitated, grunts were much quicker to informally fill in and essentially command themselves. “Army of One”?
Conclusion — moderation in all things, including tightly integrated teamwork and strong leadership?
