smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

The World Cup only comes around once every four years and should be cherished. But consider its impact on your company, urges Clodagh Murphy, director of IT company Eclipse.

It’s less than a month to go to the World Cup and in the office a majority of UK workers have admitted that they will be watching games online, according to a recent survey we carried out. Needless to say, this could create a serious drain on productivity as well as IT systems. 


So at the risk of sounding like a party pooper, it’s time to plan for the impact of employees watching live 90-minute matches on their work desktops – for example, the effect it will have on the time taken to download important files and use business-critical applications such as e-commerce sites, email or online backup.
 


One solution is to take the draconian approach of blocking web access to all known sites that stream the World Cup live, by using basic web filtering systems. However, this could lower employee morale and lead to time being wasted in attempts to circumvent the blocking. 


Accepting that some work time will be lost and planning around this eventuality may be a more realistic strategy. Start by making an assessment of your employees’ business load during the World Cup period and the required human resources to function smoothly, allowing some margin for unplanned reductions in available man-hours.

Then decide how much access to the popular World Cup games you intend to allow in the workplace. Communicate plans to staff and outline the viewing conditions. This should also prevent disruption caused by people taking unauthorised leave, as well as providing you with a great team-building opportunity should you decide to let everyone watch the games at once.
 

In terms of managing your IT systems, you can put bandwidth polices in place that restrict certain users (that is everyone except for you). You also need to make sure that you have sufficient bandwidth to cover any permitted viewing of the games. 


Once you have your policies in place, closely monitor absence and sickness records, productivity metrics, accident levels, and records of disciplinary actions to identify any undesirable patterns emerging throughout the period.

And lastly: enjoy the tournament!

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