It’s the season for distracted workers, according to outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which predicts that March Madness will have workers across the country gazing at streaming videos and managing their office pool brackets on company time.
Challenger acknowledges that the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments won’t “even register a blip on the nation’s economic radar,” and called its study of March Madness tongue in cheek, but it said the issue does highlight the way technology blurs the lines between work and off-work time.
Based on last year’s data, Challenger said online March Madness coverage could attract more than 2.5 million people, each spending 90 minutes on average watching games. The firm said that means employers “will pay distracted workers about $175 million over the first two full days of the tournament.”
