NCAA Basketball Championship: How March Madness Affects Office Networks

Your IT team knows you're watching March Madness, and they don't like it.

According to a study conducted by Modis, an IT staffing service, over two-thirds of the 500 IT professionals surveyed said they had taken steps to either lessen or block the streaming of non-work content during the annual NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship or "March Madness." Forty-two percent said they have monitored employees who have tried to stream March Madness content.

It's not that people who work in IT hate basketball -- they just like their companies' networks to function properly. The spike in streaming during the NCAA tournament puts a huge strain on a company's network, which according to the Modis study, slows connection speeds and in 34 percent of cases actually causes the network to crash.

According to Media Life Magazine, the tournament, which started on Tuesday, is the only sporting event credited with decreasing work productivity. This may be because unlike the Super Bowl or World Series, the NCAA tournament is played during work hours and includes "brackets" or placing bets on which team will win each game. A survey conducted by MSN found that 86 percent of respondents said they would spend part of their work days following the tournament.

In its annual report on the effect of March Madness on worker productivity, job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas says that according to an admittedly unscientific study, U.S. companies could stand to lose $175 million in decreased productivity during the first two days of the tournament alone.

However, the report goes on to say that this estimate is meant to be taken with a rather large grain of salt, and that the effect March Madness has on worker productivity is likely to be small.

"The company’s internet speeds may be slower, some workers will not respond to emails as promptly, and lunch breaks may extend beyond the usual time limits. It’s mostly a headache-inducing annoyance for information technology departments, human resources and department managers," Challenger, Gray & Christmas' report reads.

Other estimates aren't quite so optimistic. MSN reports that based on the estimated 50 million Americans who participate in office betting pools during March Madness, tournament following workers will cost companies a total of $2 billion in 2012.

Of course these dire predictions likely won't stop employees from keeping one eye on the games, or even skipping work entirely. Earlier this month Mashable reported on a Facebook app in which Shaquille O'Neill will "call" basketball fans' bosses with a made-up excuse for why they're not at work. The app allows people to pick from a variety of excuses like "hitting the beach," as well as several different NSFW greetings for your boss including "Playa" and "Honey Bunny."

Comments

[Saad Abughazaleh]

04:16 PM on 03/22/2012

Like Fiction Kills said, we hear the same thing year after year. Companies complain that their employees are not being as productive during march madness; they’re spending too much time watching the games and participating in office pools than getting the work they are being paid for, done. But let’s ignore the obvious benefits of this inter-office socializing and team-building fraternization.

Management keeps saying that employees need to focus a little less on the sports and more on the work, yet what they fail to contend is that by trying to block their access to these cultural cruxes, they are pushing employees to waste MORE time by trying to find ways to circumvent their blocks.

What they need is simple: to allow employees to freely view the sites they wish, electronically monitor the amount of “break time” they take on them, and have the employees themselves view their own level of productivity. Much like the Spain software, WorkMeter, this will both allow them to view whatever they wish to their hearts content, yet they will also keep track of their own productivity. As natural as breathing, if they see they haven’t been productive that day, they will want to fix it on their own, without having their supervisor breath down their neck.

[fiction kills]

12:50 PM on 03/16/2012

We hear this kind of stroy EVERY March, year after year after year! Journalists can pretty much dig up last year's article and plug in the current year's total $ cost to companies. "...companies could stand to lose $175 million in decreased productivity..." Blah blah blah.

OBVIOUSLY companies aren't losing what they would consider that much money every March or they would simply give their employees Thursdays and Fridays in late March every year in order to SAVE that lost money!

Even though I personally feel that the majority of comapnies in America stay in business despite their own ridiculously bad business practices and business decisions, I have to believe that even the WORST companies would give employees late-March Thursdays and Fridays off if they were REALLY taking that big of a hit to their bottom lines because of the Tourney. Obviously they are not.

So can we please stop the annual "Tourney costs companies X amount" article regurgitation?! By not doing anything about it, companies have proven that these articles, and the loss in productivity are irrelevant.

[justwhendoesitend]

02:23 AM on 03/16/2012

IT does not like anyone using the servers, the network or their PCs. That mean they may have to support people using their tools and application. IT numbers may not look at good. So far all the IT departments I have had to deal with have been like this. Oh and then the help desk has been out-sourced to India, then you have the fun of trying to communicate your issues. So of course the NCAA mean hitting up ESPN, CBS, school sites.... Oh my gosh how terrible.