Close readers of this blog know that I have a low threshold for “news” or “trends” that seem to be generated by the clueless and brain-dead practitioners of America’s public relations profession solely to promote the latest book or expertise of some windbag “expert” they have as a client.

Don’t know what I’m ranting about? It’s the flood of pitches about the problems with office gambling pools around the NCAA college basketball tournament, aka March Madness, every spring. Or, office romance issues around Valentine’s Day. And, I even had one last year that was concocted around the ridiculous notion of workers going overboard and watching the Summer Olympics instead of doing their jobs.

These are all urban workplace legends created out of whole cloth by PR people to hype and pitch their clients.

They are not a problem for 99 percent of the working world and simply are a case of creating a bogus workplace issue that—surprise!—there just happens to be some expert who can help solve.

This would all be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that there are equally brain-dead media types, primarily engaged in the broadcasting profession, who play into this hype and regurgitate the nonsense that these PR handlers and their “experts” are spewing. They help to perpetuate this cycle that focuses on silliness rather than really honest-to-goodness workplace issues.

And that gets me to my latest rant about something called National Boss Day. It’s apparently coming up Friday, October 16, although as Wikipedia rightly says (and readers note, I’ll probably never put that in a sentence again), “The holiday has been the source of some controversy and criticism in the United States, where it is often mocked as a Hallmark Holiday.”

I’ve had a couple of press releases today touting either workplace surveys pegged to National Boss Day or some manner of workplace expertise about how to deal with a boss that spins off the event.

Here’s my take: National Boss Day is a put-on, a fraud, a silly and senseless “event” that one would expect to find in a Monty Python sketch, an episode of The Office or a Dilbert cartoon. And in all cases, the mention of such an event should simply be to mock the pretentiousness of such BS.

Why do we need National Boss Day anyway? As a longtime boss, the last thing I want is for anyone working for me to engage in such nonsense because it seems to elevate being a boss for no other reason than because a boss has power and authority.

In my world, great bosses are honored for the good they do and the respect and loyalty they generate among those who work with them, not because someone concocted some fake day that people are expected to remember. 

So, just remember this when you read or hear some dumb “news” story on Friday about National Boss Day. When you do, smile for a second and perhaps take a moment to wonder, “What kind of real news am I missing because some idiot editor fell prey to this PR crap about National Boss Day?”

When that happens, think of me and remember, I warned you here first.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

If there’s one thing that wears me out, it’s the unrelenting flood of e-mails and phone calls from PR people trying to pitch bogus “news” trends for their clients.

These self-proclaimed “experts,” most with marginal or even questionable expertise, are out peddling themselves and, all too frequently, their new book—which no one in their right mind is going to read. And they seem to come out of the woodwork, as I wrote last year, at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, during Super Bowl week, the Summer Olympics and during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, better known as March Madness.

The March Madness “problem,” that there is a huge loss of productivity in the workplace due to employees being more focused on the college basketball tournament than the job at hand, is particularly galling, because it seems to be one of those perfect “news” stories that can be told in a 30-second sound bite on the evening news or in the top-of-the-hour radio report. People hear the chatter about all the time being lost to March Madness and just assume that it must be so.

My position on this hasn’t changed. As I wrote here way back in March 2007, “All of this talk about lost productivity because of March Madness is nonsense. I haven’t seen any credible research that supports the premise, and the ‘data’ that is used to make the point is soft and suspect.”

What HAS changed is this: The rest of the media have finally jumped on the notion that March Madness is a bogus workforce issue. Jack Shafer over at Slate.com noted in an online column yesterday that “the fear that millions of workers will waste time watching the games live for hours at the office is groundless. More than two-thirds of the games are played on weeknights or weekends, when very few employees are stuck behind their work terminals. …I counsel you to worry less about how your employees waste time and more about how much they screw off.”

Shafer’s column points to a number of media voices that have blown the whistle on the mythical March Madness problem, but alas, he seems to have missed my annual posts here at workforce.com. No matter. I’m just glad the word is finally getting out because maybe, just maybe, those news sound bites that breathlessly tout the notion of lost productivity due to March Madness will finally end.

And, I will repeat again what I said last year, because it is as true today as it was when I wrote it last March: “The notion that there is time wasted by employees due to March Madness is just another urban legend. There is no more evidence of workplace productivity losses because of March Madness than there is evidence of alligators in the sewers, Elvis living with aliens, or the Loch Ness Monster. I like fairy tales, but March Madness as a workplace problem is ridiculous.”

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

Ever wonder what PR people do when things are slow and they have too much time on their hands? I’ve got an answer to that: They huddle in corners and make up fake workplace problems.

I’ve written before about how so many experts seem to come out of the woodwork with “solutions” to problems like romance in the office (around Valentine’s Day), office pools and gambling (around the men’s college basketball tournament in March), and the perils of the company holiday party in December. Although there are some legitimate HR issues associated with all of these events, they get blown out of proportion by way too many PR people who are more interested in hawking their “expert” with an answer looking for media exposure (usually with yet another boring book to sell) than actually addressing a pressing workplace issue.

These issues are the urban legends of the workplace. There is no more evidence of employee productivity losses or other problems because of these events than there is evidence of alligators in the sewers, Elvis living with aliens, or the Loch Ness monster.

Now, in August, there’s another bogus workplace issue to add to the list: employees wasting time watching the Olympics at work. Below you’ll find the press release about this “problem” that we received this week at the Workforce Management world headquarters. The names have been removed to protect the guilty and clueless:

“With NBC boasting 7.8M unique visitors to their website on Monday, along with 15M video streams and 230M page views the first four days of the Olympics, which easily surpasses the ENTIRE 2004 Athens games, the 2008 Olympics are on pace to be the most watched ever.

“How are businesses addressing the effect that the most popular Olympics to date will have on employee productivity and workplace Internet access for the month of August? XXXX County, Maryland’s CIO, (name deleted), is using a product from (Company X) to monitor its 3000+ employees’ web usage, ensuring the county’s critical applications, staff productivity, and network resources don’t suffer as a result of the games.

“Please let me know if you are interested in speaking with (name deleted) and/or (Company X) about how companies can avoid hosting the Olympics at the office this summer.”

Is there a single manager anywhere in America worried about the Olympics cutting into productivity? The only “evidence” I can find, if you can even call it that, is this “survey” that is reported at the “News Lite: It Barely Qualifies As News” Web site. The claim is that 18 percent of workers age 18-24 “say they will catch part of the Olympics while working,” but again, there is no evidence of how this “survey” was conducted, who was surveyed or when the question was asked.

Interestingly enough, I got another press release on workers using the Internet at work for their personal purposes this week from the Kansas State University media relations office. It quotes Diane Swanson, a management professor at the university, who claims that checking the latest score on your computer or taking home a few pens from the office needs to be put in proper perspective. Swanson says: “I’m not dismissing it as a legitimate question but, for one thing, it pales in comparison to the massive highway robbery that has gone on at the top of organizations because of corporate scandals.”

And in case you think that Professor Swanson is making a case for stealing from the office, she’s not. Her memo talks about the need for businesses to talk to employees about striking a balance on these issues when so many are traveling, telecommuting and working from home. Take a read and I’m sure you agree.

But back to watching the Olympics at work: Is this a problem anywhere? Are you worried about it at your workplace? I’d love to hear from anyone out there who thinks this is a big deal (either with a comment posted here or an e-mail sent to me at jhollon@workforce.com), because in my mind, this is just another PR-driven workplace fairy tale.

There seems to be a group of topics that get consultants and PR people fired up—topics that are built around a perceived but overblown workforce problem that gives them a chance to offer up their “expertise” every year. You know the issues I’m talking about:

• Office romance at Valentine’s Day;
• The perils of the office Christmas party in December; and,
• March Madness—the NCAA men’s basketball tournament—as a workplace time-waster.

As I wrote here last year, “It’s Madness to Worry About March Madness.” As I wrote then, “All of this talk about lost productivity because of March Madness is nonsense. I haven’t seen any credible research that supports the premise, and the ‘data’ that is used to make the point is soft and suspect.”

Nothing has changed since I wrote that, and in fact, I had some readers write and tell me that March Madness was actually a really good thing for employee bonding, office morale and, in some cases, a great ROI. In fact, I also noted that I didn’t have a single comment that took issue with anything I wrote about March Madness being a positive experience in most workplaces.

Well, March Madness is here again, and so are the consultants, experts and surveys that claim it is a huge problem. CareerBuilder released a survey this week saying 19 percent of workers are involved in March Madness pools (a surprisingly low number, in my view). It implied, without citing any evidence or research, that “productivity in the office may suffer a potential slowdown.” And global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray and Christmas offered up its nutty annual “cost” of March Madness in the workplace, claiming that the “annual distraction could cost employers as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the [basketball] tournament.”

Crain’s Detroit Business, a sister publication of Workforce Management, had an interesting story this week that took the position that fantasy sports in the workplace—and by extension, things like March Madness or Super Bowl pools—can really be a good thing for workers and their employers. The headline said it all: “Are Fantasy Sports at Work Bad? Some Executives Bet Not.”

In short, the notion that there is time wasted by employees due to March Madness is just another urban legend. There is no more evidence of workplace productivity losses because of March Madness than there is evidence of alligators in the sewers, Elvis living with aliens, or the Loch Ness Monster. I like fairy tales, but March Madness as a workplace problem is ridiculous.

Here’s one last view of March Madness and the impact it has on workforce productivity. For the record, I haven’t had a single comment or heard anyone argue (at all) that it has any negative impact whatsoever. It just goes to show you: Sometimes the things that get the most negative attention have the least amount of negative impact.

From an analyst at a large insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut: “I read your piece about productivity during March Madness. I can tell you that in some departments it probably does have an impact, though I don’t believe it’s necessarily a bad thing. My department—or I should say the people I sit closest to—are not into sports at all and it drives me crazy!! I can hear people a few ‘cubes’ over talking about the game last night, etc., and I wish I could jump on over and join in!

“The reason I think it is a good thing is because I look at it as teamwork. It’s sharing something (in my case, an obsession) for a sport that others are interested in and it brings you closer as a team. Yes, there is jibber-jabbering going on, but then everyone gets right back to work with a better attitude. I’m sure there are some people who take advantage of company time but that eventually shows up in their performance, and they are the type who would take advantage anyway. My worry is when March Madness is all over—that’s when I go through withdrawals!! Then it’s on to the Red Sox!”