Rugby World Cup Set to Cost British Business £461 million

Basingstoke, September 03, 2007 – Employee productivity is expected to take a slump over the next month as Rugby World Cup fever grips UK workers, with ardent supporters costing British businesses more than £461 million in lost productivity,  according to email and Web content security vendor Marshal.

As the England team launches its campaign to defend the World Cup title, it is expected that 10% of employed Britons will spend half an hour of each working day watching coverage of matches or browsing the web for updates on scores.

This could mean bad news to employers; productivity will be impacted as employees check the Net during working hours for details on matches from live webcasts and audio feeds, analysis and predictions, to podcasts, contests and web logs. IT service will also be compromised as they download videos and interactive scoreboards, eating up valuable bandwidth and opening up the organization to potential malicious threats.

In fact, if one in ten of the UK’s 29 million employed people1 with an average hourly wage of £14.42 an hour2 spend 30 minutes a day catching up on the Rugby World Cup for the 22 working days that rugby is played, the result will be more than 31 million hours of lost productivity. 

“Following England’s victory in 2003, Rugby is now firmly placed as one of the nation’s favourite sports which means that the six weeks of the World Cup coverage looks set to dominate our screens," says, Michael Clifford, Marshal’s VP EMEA.

“Employers need to set and enforce policies on the acceptable use of the Internet. Companies can control productivity and bandwidth consumption issues by implementing policies that limit Internet access to certain sites to lunch time, and before and after working hours."

Marshal provides an Internet management solution called WebMarshal that enables administrators to enforce its company’s Internet Acceptable Use Policies as a means of improving productivity and reducing risk. It can help restore employee productivity potentially lost through non-business browsing with flexible time and bandwidth quotas assigned according to user, workstation or group, in addition to blocking offensive content and dangerous viruses.