The 2010 Fifa World Cup is providing potential headaches for employers and network service providers. The problem is that this World Cup will be the first in the history of the tournament where every game will be streamed online live, as well as being the first with high definition coverage of the tournament. Depending on country, many or most of the games will take place during normal office working hours.
In the past, employers had the choice of giving staff time off for crucial matches or not. Those who stayed away anyway – taking a sick day for example – were easily spotted. Some employers would get round this by allowing time off for key games involving the relevant country. Employers in England, for example, might allow time off to see England play.
This time though, all matches will be available online and employers are fearing a serious drop in productivity as employees openly or secretly watch games on their computers in the office while they are meant to be working.
World Cup Surveys
A survey by technology company Blue Coat Systems found that 54% of IT managers believe that employees should be banned from watching World Cup matches at work. Results also showed that they feared that their corporate networks could be placed under severe strain from bandwidth-hungry internet video, as employees opt to watch the matches.
This could prevent the networks from performing business functions, as 65% of companies admit to having no policies and 59% no technology in place to prioritise business applications and ensure the most efficient delivery of video streaming.
Employers are worried that even if they ban workers from watching games at work, they will still do so. A survey conducted among 2000 employees by Eclipse Internet found that 54% of workers were planning to watch World Cup matches while at work.
The problem could be made worse by employees communicating with friends about the matches via social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
World Cup Technology
There is technology available to help IT managers. For example, Ipswitch’s Network Management Division has launched its World Cup Network Traffic Calculator. This tool is designed to help IT managers predict and plan for the expected surge in non-work internet traffic in the workplace brought about by the World Cup.
And Fifa itself has installed a server farm in Slough, England, to house 75 super computers to support 70 million page views per hour during the World Cup. The fifa.com web site is expected to serve over 5.5 billion page views to fans over the 2010 World Cup, compared with the 4.2 billion recorded in 2006.
Taking a different approach, Odyssey Interactive has announced a World Cup Football Challenge intranet application. Available to more than 150,000 Interact intranet users, the module, it is claimed, will help organisations improve performance and drive productivity by engaging staff, increasing motivation and boosting morale. The module lets users predict the outcome of all the games and receive points based on the accuracy of the predictions. It takes seconds to join up and log predictions then the module automatically produces league tables so users can see where they are. Employers can use this to push other important news, articles and documents to employees.
See also What Beer to Drink While Watching the World Cup and Workers Take Sick days to Watch World Cup.
Steve Rogerson - Steve Rogerson is a UK-based writer specialising in television, technology, sports and beer.
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