If office work has taken a back seat to football chatter, it must be the annual Super Bowl slowdown.
Excitement over what has become the biggest single sporting event of the year in the United States may actually end up costing employers some $800 million in lost productivity the week before the big game, a report said on Monday.
In Chicago and Indianapolis, the two cities whose National Football League teams will face off on February 4 in Miami, losses could reach $85 million in the run-up to the game, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
Assuming employees, for example, spend 10 minutes a day talking about the game, making bets, surfing the Internet or shopping for a new television, their bosses will lose some $162 million per day. In a five-day workweek, that adds up to $810 million, based on average earnings and expected viewership.
Then there is the day after the championship when people discuss the game's plays, the TV commercials, or simply call in sick, resulting in more money lost, the outplacement consultant reported.
I hope nobody is paying these people to make this guess. I know lots of people who don't care about the Super Bowl one bit, and the likelihood they spend 10 minutes each workday involved in Super Bowl discussion above and beyond the time they normally spend talking about whatever personal interest they have is incredibly slight. Then there's that whole part of the question - is this supposed ten minutes per day spent on the Super Bowl in addition to the time spent discussing and doing more personal stuff at work, or just replacing something else as a priority for that week? Is this a daily ten minutes they'd normally be talking about their house or their kids' sports or the next doctor appointment or how drunk Sheila in accounting was last weekend?
But my biggest annoyance in this PR exercise committed annually by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. is that this somehow costs "the bosses". Really. Like the bosses take home less money because of this. No, if it costs anyone, and that is a big if, it costs the marketplace, because costs are transferred eventually. So let's cut out the "this is costing the employers" talk, because that's not the way companies operate in reality. And let's quit reporting the ballooning the supposed cost into such ridiculous numbers, because there's the only point of it is to get this firm in the newspaper in the first place.