Work seems to slow to a dribble during March according to a new report. American workers could spend more than eight million hours watching NCAA Tournament games from the office. March Madness may be putting a serious crimp in the economy and in the work flow of American workers according to global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

The company estimates that total online viewership during work hours will reach 8.4 million during 2011’s March Madness games. Multiply that by the average hourly earnings of American workers which is $22.87 and you’ll get a financial impact of more than $192 million. The company used 2010 statistics from CBSSports.com on traffic to the website which show that 8.3 unique visitors watched 11.7 million hours of streaming video and audio. That works out to about 1.4 hours per visitor, an increase of more than 30% over the prior year.

“At first glance, 8.4 million hours of lost productivity seems like it would deliver a crushing blow to the economy. However, it is important to remember that there are roughly 108.3 million people on private payrolls, each working anaverage of 34.2 hours per week, according to the latest Labor Department data. So, the total number of hours worked by the American workforce in one week comes to about 3.7 billion hours,” Challenger explained in a news release. “Over the three weeks of the tournament, the nation’s 108 million workers will have logged more than 11 billion hours of work. The 8.4 million hours lost to March Madness is a relative drop in the bucket, accounting for less than one-tenth of one percent (about 0.07 percent) of the total hours American workers will put in over the three weeks of the tournament,” he continued. So the good news is there is no measurable impact on the economy, but individual companies may not have their employees’ full attention during March Madness.

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