Riverbed: March Madness Offers Opportunities for Team Building

The boundary between work and leisure continues to fade as employees and IT professionals embrace the notion of streaming sporting events during working hours, according to a new study by Riverbed Technologies (RVBD).

While most of us were cheering for our favorite teams during March Madness, Riverbed used one of the year’s biggest sporting events to study the technical limitations and sociological perceptions of video streaming in the workplace.

Riverbed polled 300 employees in the IT sector as well as 100 IT professionals during the month of March to determine the technological impact of steaming HD video in the workplace, as well as any generation differences in workplace behavior among colleagues.

“One of the things that was kind of interesting about the demographics themselves was that these surveys rather confirmed the suspicion that I think many of us have, which is that for millennials there is much less of a separation between work and not work than there is especially for the Boomer generation,” said Steve Reilly, deputy CTO at Riverbed, in an interview with The VAR Guy.

More than half of employees surveyed felt organizations should let workers stream games during work, with millennials the strongest advocates of streaming while working. About 48 percent of millennials believe companies should allow individuals to stream games, compared to 17 percent of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, respectively.

“It seems like people just come and go and they’ve got a single device that they use for business and personal, and they realize that they are expected to respond to work-related things at any time of the day,” said Reilly. “So the thinking is, ‘Well, if I have to do work all the time than I should be able to do personal stuff all the time, too.’”

According to the study, 54 percent of employees and 42 percent if IT professionals believe organizations should not block the streaming of games in any capacity. About 33 percent of employees planned to actively stream March Madness games during working hours, compared to 48 percent of IT professionals.

One of the most popular suggestions for allowing employees to eat their cake and have it too was to utilize break room televisions to stream games. According to Reilly, respondents felt this was a perfect way to allow companies to mitigate their bandwidth and also provide a fun atmosphere for employees during the work day.

“People like to do these things in a communal fashion rather than sitting there at their desk,” said Reilly. “If you can bring people together in group and share a big screen, that’s a lot less bandwidth utilization than if you’ve got a thousand streams going to individual desktops. So you’re solving a technical problem with something that seems to really resonate well with humans.”