Fantasy football costs businesses millions

The nation's employers may be hit with an unexpected "tax" tied to the 2004-05 National Football League season. It is the cost of wages paid to the legions of workers taking time during office hours to manage their fantasy football league teams. For the next several weeks of the regular season and through the playoffs and Super Bowl, about 14,000,000 fantasy footballers will surf the Net, pore over statistics, make roster adjustments, and initiate player trades, many of them on company time, speculates John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., Chicago, the global outplacement firm.

The cost in lost productivity nationwide, according to Challenger, exceeds $36,000,000 even if only 10 minutes a day is spent on fantasy football team management versus working. The distraction already has prompted some employers to add sports-related websites to the list of Internet destinations to which employees are denied access by company firewalls.

"Even with such measures, companies must be prepared for the fact that productivity could slip among the more rabid fantasy football league participants," maintains Challenger. "If it is not the Internet, it could be 10 minutes of chatting around the watercooler with other league aficionados. For every 10 minutes an employee chats at the watercooler about the tournament, the company is basically paying for unproductive worktime."

COPYRIGHT 2004 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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