“…fantasy football owners costing employers as much as $1.1 billion a week in lost productivity”(From Reuters, “Fantasy Football sacks real work production”, 8-16- 2006)
That’s the most popular number being bandied about the world of television, newspapers, magazines and the internet about how much money companies are losing due to productivity drops attributed to fantasy football. It is the sort of number that is drawn from the candy bowl of meaningless statistics at a board of directors meeting and used to alert everyone of the impending doom to year-end bonuses. I believe the same number was initially used to describe the devastating corporate impact of the solitaire game that comes with the Windows operating system.
First off – that number was created by a study done for a national job placement firm and was derived by taking a supposed universe of 37 million fantasy footballers (about double the number typically used) against a meaningless national average wage and then grabbing out of the air a subjective 50 minutes per week spent on their teams instead of working. They multiplied this on a very big calculator and now the media and boardrooms are hanging decisions on a fabricated fact that businesses are losing $1.1 billion per week that evidently they would have gained without fantasy football in the workplace. And people get paid to come up with numbers like that - seriously.
Figuring that the average person takes about an hour lunch each day would therefore suggest that U.S. companies are losing $5 billion weekly because employees are eating leftover meatloaf at their desk or running down to the closest sandwich shop. Hey look – I can do this too!
But such a number is created and then lands into some article that your boss reads. And then he has an employee come into his office. Maybe it is some girl about to get in trouble for surfing celebrity websites all day. Maybe it is a guy who is chronically late to work because he uses his evening hours to ignite his fledgling career as a rock star in his garage. Whoever it is, rather than take responsibility for what they have done, they do the natural thing – they throw you and your league mates under the proverbial bus.
“Yeah, but those guys in the west wing do NOTHING all day but talk about fantasy football.”
“Oh really…?”
It can happen a thousand different ways but the end result is usually the same – a corporate crackdown on the evils of fantasy football which is supported by – look at this! $1.1 billion per week lost by companies! Suddenly the ranking of company evils tucks fantasy football between embezzlement and parking in the CEO’s reserved spot (actually reverse those two). It’s even much, much worse than taking home company pencils which is another pointless stat that humorless statisticians with no real world experience use to justify their overpriced job.
Next thing you know, that momentary jaunt to TheHuddle.com or ESPN suddenly returns a screen that says “Page Blocked” AKA “Not today, slacker”. Suddenly there are corporate brown shirts on the prowl listening for any whispered conversation that utters “quarterback”, “touchdown” or “the bastard went out on the one yard line”. Corporate email filters begin to search for words like “Roethlisberger” or “sleeper”. You are an outcast now. You must stamp your forehead with “FF” and once again start climbing up the corporate caste system. Work Shirker! Waster of company profits! All that is left is for Bill Lumbergh from the movie Office Space to show up at your cubicle.
“Ahh, I’m going to have to go ahead and ask you to come in on Sunday, too…”
Such is the reality at some workplaces. Most moderately tolerate it if they have not read “the article” yet. Too few look the other way as long as the work they are paying you for is getting done. But – I am here to make one claim. Businesses should not prohibit it. They should embrace it and realize that it makes for better employees.
Before we proceed there is one significant caveat. It doesn’t matter if it is fantasy football, collecting comic books or bass fishing. If an employee has an obsession that impacts the quality and quantity of work that he or she does, it is fair enough for any business to prohibit it from the workplace. You are not compensated with a salary just for sitting in a particular chair the required amount of time each day, at least not in the private sector. You are employed to perform an agreed level of work for which the company will pay you. Do your work to an acceptable level – they have to pay you. If your work is not acceptable – they can get rid of you or travel other unsavory paths. As a manager for many years in a large corporation, I was amazed how those facts escaped so many employees. But the bottom line – if you do your work, then fantasy sports are a benefit to the workplace.
Fantasy Football – The Key to Increasing Company Profits
It is in the interest of every company to employ people that will create the products or services desired and by that earn a profit for their employer. The better all employees do together, the better the company will do. Introducing, or at least allowing, fantasy football in the workplace not only makes for a happier employee, it increases the skills and abilities that mark a valuable worker.
Unlike other interests and hobbies that make their way into the work environment, fantasy football provides a training course or at least a refresher in the traits of a successful organization. By taking leadership of their own “team” during the course of the NFL season, they will step through the checklist of a model employee.
Let’s pretend that you and I are employees of SuperBigCorp who have been called into a conference room with ten other co-workers. A pert young lady wearing dark-rimmed glasses and some insanely poofy scarf around her neck waits for everyone to be seated. She checks off some items on her clipboard and then sets it on the table while she informs you that the company has developed a new employee improvement program that offers workers the chance to create a fantasy football league.
“…and at the conclusion of the four month period that coincides with the NFL season, we will evaluate each person in the league to determine if they have learned and exhibited the desired characteristics, skills and abilities necessary for success.”
She starts pointing at a list of words on the white board and explaining their meaning.
Team Work – You are tasked with assembling this group as a league of fantasy team owners. You must determine who will be the league manager by a popular vote and that “commissioner” will be entrusted with maintaining the health of the league and ensuring that all rules are adhered to in addition to organizing any and all team activities to include a draft and an awards ceremony for the winner. You must all come together to create an agreed upon set of leagues rules that all must follow and the group must devise a scoring system that is viewed as fair to all teams. You must end with a clear winner of the league in an agreed upon fashion. You must all work together as a team.
Multi-tasking – Through the entirety of the four months, you must ensure that your work here never suffers and that this fantasy league does not impact your ability to do your job at SuperBigCorp. You must make the decisions regarding when you will work on this league and then adopt it seamlessly into your workflow. You must perform task prioritizing each week for the next four months never failing to give your fantasy team the needed attention while performing that only after you have ensured that your needed SuperBigCorp work will be completed as required.
Improvement-Oriented – You will not be allowed to merely field a fantasy team and then ride it through the season. You must continually analyze your roster and starting lineup for improvement by way of a waiver wire or by trading as sanctioned by the league. You must improve your team with every opportunity that you find. An improvement of just 1% in your team can result in winning more games and an eventual championship. Always strive for improvement.
Adaptability – Your team may suffer injuries or other dynamics that were unforeseen when originally created. You must show the ability to adapt to the new situation and make the best of it. You cannot merely accept a setback and do nothing about it. You must respond to change in a positive, reasonable manner with an eye for at least maintaining your status quo if not improving it. You must adapt.
Sound Judgment – You must exhibit sound judgment when creating and maintaining your team. Failure to show proper judgment will impede your ability to field an optimal team. In the event that your judgment fails on a player or a strategic move, you must show that you have learned from the mistake and incorporate that into your future ability to judge people, situations and potential outcomes. You must exhibit an ever increasing ability to make sound judgments based upon what you have learned and done.
Ethics – During the course of your season, you may encounter situations where you have privileged information that others do not have. You must not act unethically in trying to induce others to take action based on flawed information or beliefs. You will be judged on how you treated the members of this league. If you act outside of the agreed rules, you can be subjection to sanctions or even dismissal from the league. You must act ethically in all that you do.
Competition – You must understand that while you will show ethical behavior and that you must work together as a team, you are in competition with each other. Your success will be measured not on your potential and not your relationship with the commissioner. It will be tallied from the metrics of wins and losses of your team over the course of the season. You must compete each week and the management of your team must be in the interests of fielding the most competitive squad possible.
Security and safety – You must demonstrate your concern about the security of your roster and the safety of your team in its entirety – not just one or two players. You must determine when you should acquire back-ups for your best players to ensure that you will continue to field an optimal team even in the event of misfortunes happening to your players. You must plan for contingencies even if they do not occur. You must also ensure the proper security for your team so that no one else is able to harm your team. This means securing any passwords and making sure that only approved personnel have access to your team. You must demonstrate risk management for your team.
Recognition – Both as a league and as individual team owners, you must recognize other team owners for accomplishments including but not limited to winning the eventual championship. You must make the reward for winning worthwhile and a desired goal of every team member. At the awards ceremony, you must honor your league champion and publicize any other notable accomplishments by other team owners.
Through the process of creating and maintaining your fantasy team while demonstrating the above listed abilities, it is also expected that you will make personal improvement to a number of skills that should be a part of your normal work here at SuperBigCorp. These include but are not limited to:
Analytic aptitude - You must show an increasing skill at analysis where you can analyze the statistics generated by the NFL both this season and from previous years. You will understand what happened in the past and determine how that applies to your players – both currently owned and potentially acquired. You may use numerical modeling but must also show the ability to apply sound judgment based on non-numerical events and conditions. Your team’s future depends upon your ability to analyze the past and present.
Communication – Through the course of the season, you must devise the most effective and efficient manners of communication between team members and the league as a whole. You must ensure that all team owners remain completely informed of all league issues and situations and you must cultivate inter-personal relationships with other team owners to enact trades of players or assist each other with necessary tasks. You are expected to remain in communication during the four months with a dialogue that you all find enjoyable and entertaining if not informative as well. You must remain in communication with each other. You are not allowed to merely run a team in silence by yourself without any interaction with other team owners.
Decision-Making and Problem Solving – These skills will be challenged on a continual basis. You must determine who the best players are to build an optimal team when it is your turn to draft. You must also respond to any problem that happens during the course of the season with reasoned and proactive decision making. While you are encouraged to consider the advice and information of others, it is you who must turn that into an action that affects only your team. You are responsible for the results of your team – no else is. Your ability to make decisions and resolve problems will be critical to your team’s success.
Forecasting – Managing a fantasy team is not about collecting players that have been good in the past, it is about acquiring them for their future value from which you will either profit or fail. You must exhibit the ability to turn past results and current dynamics into a reasonable and reliable view of the future from which you can make the proper decisions. This will entail the use of analysis, communication, information gathering and some mathematical skills. You must determine a numerical expression of each player’s future value and apply sound judgment to each regarding their reliability, opportunity, risk and upside for the coming season.
Computer skills – It is imperative that you are able to effectively use a computer during the management of your team. Your league must exist only in an electronic format and you must show an ability to interact with the league system in order to view your team, submit weekly lineups, conduct free agent transactions and communicate with other members of your league. Additionally, it is encouraged that you learn either database or spreadsheet skills in order to perform your player analysis and create your projected statistics for each player. You must also be able to efficiently and effectively use the internet for gaining knowledge that will be used in your analysis and decision making processes.
You will be evaluated at the end of the season based on the performance of your team which will be an expression of how well you used those skills and abilities. This cannot impact your normal work here at SuperBigCorp. Are you interested in joining the SuperBigCorp fantasy football league?
This is about the time that I would jump up and say “Well hell yeah!” (Author’s note - I never was a great fit in the corporate world). The question is if such a “program” would create a better employee? It had better since each of the above skills and abilities come directly from an employee evaluation form. Collecting comic books or bass fishing may bring great value into many people’s lives, but do they create a more skilled, capable employee? Fantasy football does. Name any other hobby that can have such a positive impact on the skills and abilities that employers want in their employees. Bet you can’t.
Fantasy Football is like a crash course in business that touches on almost every area of work that is desirable to employers. It plays out like a course in an MBA program with even more measurable results.
Here’s the kicker – people enjoy playing fantasy football. It brings them together in a fun, competitive situation that only lasts about four months of the year. A pervasive problem in our country is the ability of companies to retain their best employees and make continued use of their skill sets. And so they want to squash the one activity that brings them together, gives them pleasure and entertainment and reinforces every skill and ability that the company desires them to have? Curious, eh?
But hey, someone, somewhere, pulled the figure $1.1 billion out of the corporate ether and now hundreds if not thousands of people are playing solitaire at lunch instead of logging onto my or any other fantasy football website. I’m not bitter, just a bit perplexed. Oh yes, and you can be damn sure that I’ll be keeping this pencil too… |
