For two days every March, offices around the nation find themselves clutched in the grip of the annual fervor of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament. Frankly, it’s easy to see why, as even people who carry a general malaise toward undergraduate roundball get inevitably sucked in to the bevy of Cinderella stories and emotionally charged moments that the tourney consistently brings. Of course, since the opening (and most exciting) round of the tournament occur during business days, stories lamenting productivity loss and compromised job standards during that time is about as routine as a pre-game layup drill. Now, these tales are either the gospel truth or downright hokum depending on where you source your media, but whether or not you believe that a severe decline in work occurs during the tourney or not merely scratches the surface of a potentially larger issue. That is, if your company feels the need to ban the creation of the in-house office pool that has long been associated with March Madness, how can you implement the policy without looking like an utter killjoy?
The secret behind putting the kibosh on an in-house tournament lies in the realization that a healthy chunk of your employees are still going to be invested in the tournament in one way or another. If you forbid the creation of a tourney pool, do not be naïve to the fact that some of your staff will be involved with a tournament or two in their own personal life. And with the proliferation of the internet and social media, expect a hoop-centric buzz to emanate throughout the office anyway. In fact, even if you have stringent anti-surfing computer technology loaded into your network, people will still find ways to get updates throughout the day. For example, I used to work at a company where cell phones were banned from workstations and whose internet access was limited to federal and state government sites, Mapquest, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (I still have never figured out how or why we were granted access to the latter site). Yet every time March Madness rolled around, some of my former co-workers still came up with ways to conjure up ongoing results and funnel them throughout the office. The lesson derived from this anecdote is simple; if you are going to try and prevent people from periodically checking in on tournament action during the first round, be prepared to fight a losing battle.
And therein lay the best way to handle the tournament if your company feels the need to prohibit an office-wide pool. Acknowledge the fact that in-house intermittent score-checking will occur during the first round of the tournament, and don’t make too big of a furor about it when it happens. The key to that statement is “intermittent;” if an employee does nothing but constantly surf the net looking for scores and updates, then there is an obvious problem. That exception aside, if you allow your employees to occasionally carve out a few seconds to obtain scores without calling them to the carpet, your staff will be much more at ease with your no office pool mandate. Plus, this small act will serve as recognition of your staff’s interests outside of work, which is something that typically goes a long way. In other words, you will create a winning situation, which is more than I can hopefully say about Duke this year.
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