Every year workers spend countless hours filling out and perfecting their tournament brackets and keeping pace up to the minute with all the action. There is a lot of talk about the impact that this process has on the productivity of an organization and its workers. Experts and researchers are always moaning and groaning about the money lost and what needs to be done to cut down on the time spent with the brackets and games. You can read reports published by Careerbuilder and other business resources listing off facts and figures with cynical conclusions being drawn about the negative impact it is having. While people may indeed be spending paid time watching and following the tournament, there are definitely good things that can be said as well. The office pools and “watercooler” conversations provide valuable bonding time between employees that many times involve management as well. Fighting the event will more than likely result only in employees sneaking around(March Madness OnDemand features a “boss” button that has a fake spreadsheet that will be pulled up to make it appear you are doing work) and feeling ‘snubbed’ by management. As much as it would be easiest to endorse these activities seen as commonplace and harmless, the law prohibits workplace gambling. Many organizations include a policy stating cases will be dealt with on a discretionary basis thinking they will be able to say they have a policy but not enforce it. Organizations should recognize that even when a policy is in place if it is shown that they knew gambling took place they can be held accountable. While there is no clear solution for this issue it does raise some interesting questions. So as the pools fill up and the brackets become littered with scratch marks, here are some interesting figures to think about.

• Over 40 million workers have participated in office pools conducted during paid hours
• Almost 2 million of those will watch games online from their desk
• If these workers spend only 10 minutes a day(A decidedly low number) on the march madness festivities the total loss over the 16 days would be $1.7 billion