soccer_ballAmerican sports viewers are starting to become much more interested in soccer. Witness for example the Monday night USA versus Ghana World Cup game broadcast on ESPN last Monday night.  That event captured about 16 million viewers.  To put that into perspective, Game 5 of the NHL finals had about 6 million viewers.      As the World Cup progresses, interest will increase among a lot of people, including your workforce, especially if Team USA continues to do well.  And that might affect your business and you might wonder why.

Well if you are selling World Cup merchandise it can be great. But if you are not, it might cause downtime and lost productivity due to the fact that each day, two World Cup games are played at 12 noon and 3PM eastern time and that access to live streaming of the video and/or audio of each game is available even to those who know little about internet search engines.    With growing interest and excitement in the sport, in Team USA and the World Cup in general, employees can easily get distracted and waste your valuable time and resources because these games are happening right in the middle of the business day.

There are ways around it though.  One to consider to address this issue as well as a host of other scenarios is to place Employee Monitoring Software on the computers of your employees and to let them know you are doing so.  They say locks are meant to keep honest people honest and candidly that is one of the ways that employee monitoring software works — when employees know what is being measured, they focus more on the good things and cut down on the bad things.  That means less streaming audio and video and more time focused on the activities that drive the business forward.

At IT Radix, we have put this software in use at a number of clients and the gains that come to the business are many, even far beyond cutting down on workers wasting time.   We would be happy to discuss this with any smart business manager.

And in the meantime……GO USA!