March Madness, once dreaded by businesses and managers as a productivity killer, is being accepted and even embraced as a morale booster despite some estimates that say the wildly popular tournament costs U.S. employers billions of dollars.
"I would be hard-pressed to think there are a lot of companies that are not doing something for March Madness," said Kelly Workman, Boston market manager for Robert Half International, a staffing firm. "You can fight it or you can go with it and try to make the most out of it."
Research by Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimates just filling out brackets will cost employers across the U.S. at least $1.9 billion for every hour employees spend on it. Still, the firm sees March Madness as a positive.
"We think it's a good buy for American companies," John Challenger said. "Companies are looking for ways, in this era, to bring their workers together and to build trust and to build relationships around them."
Challenger said the NCAA tournament is unlike any other event.
"It is such a quintessentially workplace event," he said.
In recent years, coverage of the tournament has shifted online, with the NCAA and CBS boasting that every game is available live. This can lead to IT problems, Challenger said, with basketball games eating up a company's valuable bandwidth. The response to this, he said, is to put televisions in break and lunch rooms, rather than completely shut off access to the games.
Workman said many of her clients are using the tournament for good, doing everything from projecting the games on a wall to donating proceeds from bracket pools to charity.
Hunter Perry, Boston lead at WeWork, said WeWork has organized a bracket pool — for prizes, not cash — across all 17 of its locations and 8,000 members.
"It helps connect people that probably would have never connected prior," Perry said. "It's a good way to bring together like-minded people or people who have similar interests."
Perry said he expects the private sports lounge in WeWork's Fort Point location to be in high demand.
Jordan Fliegel, CEO and founder of CoachUp, is taking a measured approach. He said he has no problem with employees keeping an eye on games, as long as they stay productive.
"We treat people like adults," he said. "Startups are a marathon, you have got to put some fun into it."
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