They are a common sight on office walls this time of year, flyers featuring words like “Bracket Challenge!” or “NCAA Pool,” often with requests for $5 or $10.
And they inevitably trigger an annual debate: Is the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament an enemy to worker productivity or is it a great way to boost office morale?
As many as 58 million people will participate in college hoops bracket challenges this year, employment researchers estimate, indicating that the pools are widely accepted as a standard activity in the American workplace.
“I think it kind of brings people together,” Jeff Brown, a staffer at the National Republican Congressional Committee, said last week as he took a lunch break to watch basketball with co-workers. “It gets people involved, and it’s nice if you’re new and you don’t know a lot of people. It can be positive if you do it right.”
Taking time to study a 65-team bracket and then carving out time to watch the 64 games -- including 49 this week -- is also part of the deal. Challenger, Grey and Christmas, an employment outplacement firm, estimates that office pools will create $1.8 billion in lost productivity this year, due to the average worker wasting 100 minutes in the first week alone of the tournament, which begins Tuesday.
But many workers, including Brown, say there’s no way to prove those minutes would have been well-spent otherwise. Even the firm’s CEO, John Challenger, calls the numbers a “blip on the productivity radar.”
“In fact,” Challenger says, “with worker stress and anxiety heightened, a little distraction could be just what the doctor ordered.”
Only a third of companies surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management have policies that prohibit office pools, and only 4 percent have disciplined a worker for participating.
But this laid-back attitude belies the fact that pools are harshly condemned by the NCAA and are illegal throughout most of the country. While state laws vary, only Nevada explicitly allows betting on games involving college sports. In some states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, sports pools are allowed as long as no one profits beyond their own personal winnings. And lawmakers in Michigan and Wisconsin recently tried but failed to create exemptions for pools involving small amounts of money and a limited group of people.
No matter the location or the law, legal experts say that a participant's chances of being arrested and prosecuted for participating in a $5 or $20 office pool are somewhere between slim and none.
Nevertheless, they can still find themselves in hot water at work.
Anthony Mattia once ran an office pool while working for a government contractor serving the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington. He earned a warning after he posted the standings of the bracket challenge following the first weekend of games.
“The office manager passed by and said, ‘This isn’t for money is it?’” Mattia said. “That could have definitely gotten me in a lot of trouble.”
While working as a newspaper reporter in Manassas, Va., Ted Edison wrote a column about his $160 in pool winnings, replacing his own name with a fictional character named Phil. The column earned him a scolding from the paper's publisher and managing editor.
“This was after it made print, but I realized that it was not my best judgment to write it,” said Edison, who kept his job.
Rick Neuheisel, the head football coach at UCLA, was fired from the University of Washington after playing in a high-stakes basketball pool with neighbors in 2003. A manager for AT&T in New Jersey was arrested in 2002 for taking a cut of pool proceeds that totaled several thousand dollars.
“It’s worse if there’s an employee profiting off of it just by organizing it,” said Michael McCann, associate professor at the University of Vermont School of Law, and a contributor to Sports Illustrated. “In the ‘tier of wrongs’ it would appear to be less wrong to have a winner-take-all.”
In some instances, workers are not clear about their company's policy regarding office pools. Two employees with the law firm of O'Melveny and Myers in Washington, D.C., said they believed their office stopped running pools after a former federal prosecutor with the firm expressed unease with them. But a spokeswoman said all of the firm's offices are free to hold pools if they so choose, and that the D.C. office plans to hold one and donate part of the proceeds to charity.
Some institutions, including branches of the military and the U.S. Postal Service, have clear policies against office pools. But for most employers, it's up to managers to decide whether to allow them.
While office pools are often cast as benign, gambling addiction counselors said they can trigger larger problems with betting.
“For some gamblers, it isn’t as much the money as the rush, and all of the sudden the games are so much more interesting,” said Pat Jessie, director of gambling services for Bensinger, DuPont and Associates, an employee assistance firm. “Then they start looking at other gambling.”
But workers don’t appear to be too scared off by the notion of addiction, loss of productivity or a reprimand.
“It’s probably a drain on things,” said Sean Doran, a paralegal who has worked for several firms in Washington. “But I think you make up for it with morale and people liking each other.”
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