I thought that this was interesting data, so I report it here:
Fantasy Football’s cost to lost productivity will be more than $13 billion dollars this year (2014), since it will be played by more than 25 million people (with 4 of 5 being men) with an average weekly time investment of 8.7 hours per person.
Is this lost money for companies or does it have some benefits? It is hard to measure that or make one inference for so many different work cultures… Each of us has our own beliefs and observations and frameworks to evaluate the impacts.
Creating some workplace fun can have positive benefits.
As to benefits, 54% of the players say that their participation increases camaraderie with fellow employees and that participation helps with the building of better rapport with their business contacts (16%). It is fun to be a fan and to share fandom and close interactions can have benefits to teamwork and collaboration.
And the reality is that it would be hard to actually block workplace participation in such an activity and attempts to repress it would probably be met with some resistance. While sharing a common adversary might improve teamwork, the dynamics of that might cause problems.
(Here is an article about workplace sabotage and some of the driving factors)
And it is about money. Wonder why you see so many advertisements for Fantasy Football leagues? Overall, fantasy sports shows the average player spending $111 and the industry raking in $1.1 billion dollars in 2013.
And workplace interruptions of all kinds consume about 3 to 5 hours of time a day with costs estimated to be over $580 billion a year, so fantasy football represents only a small part of of the cost of people and performance.
The question I would frame up is how much are we doing to involve and engage our people into the game of our organizations and use that shared mission and goal to help drive more desired behavior, innovation, involvement and ownership?
For the FUN of It!
Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.
Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
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(Statistics from newsletter of workforce.com and you can see a graphic overview of this data and a few more statistics and ideas at http://www.workforce.com/articles/20746-by-the-numbers-september-2014 and http://www.workforce.com/articles/20496-by-the-numbers-june-2014 )
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