World Cup Equals Lost Productivity

The workplace can be a strange place when the soccer is on.

That's definitely the case in Brazil, where businesses and schools close so that the country can en masse watch its team play. Some Brazilians have been known to postpone elective surgery until after a match. (Their doctors probably had a hand in those decisions.)

In other countries, employers have learned the hard way not to get between workers and their soccer. Hundreds of night-shift workers went on strike from a Fiat plant in Italy because the factory wouldn't give them time off to watch the country's opening match against Paraguay. (Of course, given Italy's dismal performance at this year's World Cup, maybe the factory owners were on to something.)

German fans seem particularly fanatical about their team's performance, so much so that one recent study estimated that the productivity lost during the monthlong World Cup tournament totaled $8 billion. Given this, many employers find ways to enable their workers to see the national team play. (Indeed, many managers are as fanatical as their employees and so have no problem granting time away from work for the couple of hours needed to feed the obsession.)

Eager to keep workers onsite, businesses in many countries have set up special viewing rooms, so that employees can watch as a team. On the other side of the coin is something akin to what happened in the Netherlands recently, when the workday ended at 1 p.m., so that workers could leave work in time to see the Dutch team play.

Then there's the surfing. It's altogether one thing to not work while the game is on. But what about before and after? That $8 billion lost productivity figure out of Germany probably includes time spent by employees trawling the Internet for analysis about their national team's performance (and potential next opponent). Internet aside, there's still the large number of water cooler conversations surrounding World Cup goings-on that necessarily take time out of many a workday (although these kinds of production-loss-enducing conversations are much more difficult to pinpoint, since almost anything could be the subject of a water cooler conversation).

What does it all mean? Good question, that. It's a mixed bag. Soccer is bigger in some countries than it is in others. In the U.S., for instance, the World Cup is taking place in the summertime but during the workday (given the time difference between U.S. time zones and South Africa). Figures released by the TV network that broadcast the American team's last game, against Ghana, show that about 20 million Americans tuned in to watch the game. That figure might seem quite high until you reflect on the population of the country, which exceeds 300 hundred million by a good bit. There's always something bigger going on in the U.S.

In other countries, however, like most of the South American and European powerhouses, where soccer (or football) borders on a religious pursuit, the chance to support the team by actually watching the games in real time is nothing short of a shared entitlement, expected as a right and definitely missed if that right is taken away. As has been seen above, many employers are taking the path of least resistance and in some way allowing their employees to watch the games.