Work and the World Cup

On Thursday, Stephanie Fingal of the Employers’ Consultative Association warned that “Work has to go on” in response to Newsday questions about the impact of the World Cup 2018. The games with local football fans vociferously backing their teams and looking for harbour in the many available venues for viewing, have begun not without excitement on the field even in these early days, for instance Mexico trouncing Germany yesterday.

The spectacle mainly via television, will happen during working hours and Ms Fingal advised companies to record matches and replay them during the lunch hour or after work. But what is already known from a recorded playback takes away from the thrill of it all. That’s one approach to the challenges that employers will face with staff during the weeks of the popular FIFA event, but it’s not the only solution. Companies all around the world, some of them operating in countries with teams that are both participating and popular, have been considering the problem as well.

In Brazil, state workers have the option of scheduling their hours around the games being played by their beloved team. In some companies, arrangements are made to trim work expectations when popular games are on, with an in-house event built around the 90 minutes of the game, an opportunity for human resources to engage in team building on the other side of the screen.

Since everyone isn’t interested in the World Cup, a potentially sacrilegious thing to acknowledge, admittedly, companies have explored inviting those who are immune to football fever to earn compensatory time off redeemable after the end of the event. Anyone who thinks the World Cup watching fever is limited to the rank and file of a business is simply wrong.

Dona Cherian of Gulf News surveyed 8,000 professionals in the Middle East and discovered that 32 percent of company directors and senior executives plan to watch matches at work compared to 28 percent of staff. The survey also found that employees in customer service were more likely to take days off while deskbound workers would be inclined to watch at their desks. So, spreadsheets may not be that riveting.

Fortune’s analysis of potential losses resulting from a drop in productivity as a result of World Cup viewing assume that 50 percent of a company’s workforce are avid fans. The result? An estimated loss of US$14.5 billion in GDP worldwide. Why not just clamp down on all this fuss? Analysis of workplace productivity suggests that the average employee is up to 15 percent more productive when they are happy. No matter what employers try to do to accommodate the World Cup, there’s going to be a cost in time and attention. Businesses that work with employees to design interesting engagement alternatives and go with the flow of the excitement position themselves to reap parallel rewards. What’s lost in hours and focus might well be regained with refreshed loyalty from employees who feel that their interests and passions are being considered meaningfully by the company.

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"Work and the World Cup"

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