March Madness or management madness? How the NCAA tournament can impact workplace productivity

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Welcome to March Madness, when a confluence of non-fans, casual fans, and hardcore fans clutch their brackets and wait — and in the process, worker productivity becomes secondary. 

With so many balls in the air, March Madness roars into the list of issues managers must juggle.

“March Madness has a huge draw negatively on worker productivity,” said Labor Attorney and Human Resources Expert Zachery Bombatch.

“That’s really the most exciting thing going on, Bombatch said. “So, it just draws a lot of people to it. There’s just a lot of fanfare, so it’s well established that businesses can expect to lose a lot of productivity during this these few weeks.”

Bombatch says that loss of productivity can get turned into a positive if management embraces the mood.

“Well, they need to embrace it because it’s really at this point an inevitability, Bombatch said. “It’s going to happen. People are going to be following the tournament, they’ll be checking him in their brackets, they’ll be looking at the games, and at this point, you might as well embrace it.”

In fact, Bombatch says employers can use the tournament for team building.

“Especially if you’ve got folks who really want to be in the office versus folks who don’t, this might be a great intersection for both of them to come together, interact and finally find a little bit more of that camaraderie and morale that we’ve been talking about,” Bombatch said.

Bombatch says you can make it attractive by having games on screens in a break room and have events throughout the day — and says it can all be done without surrendering all control of the workplace by setting up guidelines and embracing the fun.