Should You Give Staff Time Off To Watch World Cup Games?
As a business leader or manager, whether you love, hate or are indifferent to the World Cup you will not be able to escape its influence over the next 6-8 weeks. Even though it doesn’t start for 2 weeks, the most devoted fans will already be slightly distracted, making plans to take time off, so they can watch their country play and hopefully win their world-cup games. They’ll be setting up fantasy football leagues, arranging sleepovers, world cup parties, and let’s face it, some fairly heavy drinking sessions, (who knows you might be leading the charge), all of which could accumulate to create productivity, availability and scheduling issues. If handled very badly, it could also lead to unauthorized absences, employees coming to work drunk and/or disorderly, conflict and low morale.
So, what should you do? The key thing is not to do nothing, as its likely both employee morale and customer satisfaction will be negatively affected as a result of employer inaction.
One of the first crucial actions you should take is to encourage employees to plan ahead and to work out when and which group games they wish to watch and what time they will need off to do this.
Where possible, allow employees to work flexibly during the World Cup period, by allowing them to take time pre-planned time off during working hours as long as they make the hours back up within the month. Don’t forget that from the end of June in the UK, all employees (not just those with children), have the right to request to work flexibly. The advantage of allowing employees to work flexibly and work back the hours, is that you won’t experience a drop in output or productivity over the month, as a result, like you would if the employees use holiday to watch World Cup Matches.
Alternately, you can allow employees to take days or a half-day holidays, but if lots of employees decide to take full days to enjoy matches it will create a resourcing headache, so I think it may be best to encourage the minimalist option of using flexible working and half days, rather than full days holiday.
Another good option is to get a TV on site in order that employees can watch the games without leaving the office, reducing the amount of lost work time, and creating a sense of community and team spirit in the office. Designate a TV watching room, so match watching doesn’t spread around the office and interrupt work. Depending on the nationalities in the office you may need to make it clear which games will have priorities during any fixture clash. You’ll need to set your own policy on this, but this will most likely be led by which country the office is in and which country most employees are in. I’ll leave you to argue over this one! Of course for many, it will be a formality.
Try and get into the spirit of the world cup and consider setting up a fantasy football league within your office, using a free app like this one from RICS. You can use the buzz from the world cup to create team spirit within the office and between offices in different countries. Its a great way for employees across the company to interact with each other, in a semi-competitive but ultimately fun way, so a great team building opportunity.
Of course, there are also plenty of people who not are interested in the world cup and won’t be benefiting from it and may need to pick up the slack of others during the world cup. These staff, or any staff who work through the world-cup without taking time off for games could feel that they are being taken advantage of. Therefore, you could contemplate offering a small incentive in the form of a reward for employees who maintain a 100% absence record during June and July, the world cup period.
So, as you can see, its makes business senses to work with employees so that they are free to enjoy the world cup spirit. Why put yourself in the way and make your business the lightening rod for their frustrations at not being able to watch their national team? Rather make yourself the hero by giving them the opportunity to watch the games they want , either on-site or via days off using their holiday allowances and flexible working.
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