Unethical Office Pools

Every year lots of men and women across the country find out if they won money in their office Super Bowl pool. Those who lose have a chance to recoup their cash in pools for the NCAA March Madness, Academy Awards, the World Series, and perhaps even the Presidential election. For every season, there is a chance to bet and win at the office, and the winnings can be as high as five figures. Office pools involving cash are common, exciting, and potentially lucrative. But they can violate corporate policies and the law. So the question arises, are these office pools ethical?

It has often been debated that office pools do encourage office morale resulting in greater productivity. The supporters of these office pools feel it’s all just harmless fun. Office pools build morale and camaraderie. For example, at the beginning of football season, we kick in a few dollars, then follow our team over the coming weeks and months. Most of us lose. A few of us win. What's the harm in that? Even if there happens to be no legal or policy issues at stake, the harm has to do with how stakeholders would view the business if on-the-job gambling activities were revealed. For example, if the stakes are high, the result of the pool could create disharmony in the workplace, and the problems could escalate.

But the fact is that is unethical to be part of any betting pools at the work place. The office simply isn't an appropriate place for gambling. It's called a workplace for a reason: It's the place where we're supposed to work. Things that interfere with doing our job should be done before or after work. If even a small percentage of fellow employees, board members, and shareholders is likely to be troubled by the practice of on-site betting, that alone is sufficient cause for concern. Some stakeholders may have religious objections to it. Others might be concerned that employees will not give their full attention to their work. A third group may simply view gambling on the job as unseemly. Whatever the objections are, they deserve to be taken seriously.

Office pools are also unethical due to the lost productivity at the work place. As a result, during the time of March Madness, some companies block ability to stream videos. Companies don’t want its employees sitting at their desk watching games. Moreover, streaming videos uses up a lot of computer network resources and eats up bandwidth, hurting business operations. It is estimated that $1.7 billion is lost in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament if workers spend just 10 minutes a day on March Madness activity. Also, up to 37.3 million workers participate in office betting pools. This year, for the first time, every single game of the NCAA March Madness was streamed online. Additionally, the little red "boss button" on the NCAA Sports.com streaming video site came in handy to many. Many NCAA basketball fans were toggling between the game and the fake business charts that the site kindly provided, just a click away in case the boss walked by.Another argument that office pools are unethical has to do around the taxes involved with the cash winnings. For example, we are legally required to file a federal tax return each year where all your income needs to be reported. A very small percentage of the employees involved in these pools report their winnings as part of the taxes. The FBI estimated that $2 billion (mostly not reported in taxes) changes hands in just office-run March Madness pools each year.

The workplace has no room for March Madness or any other betting pools. But the reason has nothing to do with productivity or computer use. All these are considered office pools. And office pools are, by definition, gambling.