With just under a month to go before the World Cup, it's action stations for everyone involved. But what are companies with no real involvement in the event planning to do to address the inevitable dip in productivity that soccer fever may bring about?

My colleagues and I have spent a lot of management time pondering how the Soccer World Cup time is really going to impact our business.

 We have been hearing for years what a brilliant impact the event will have on the economy of our country, but as we get closer to D-day, we’ve got that worrying feeling that the impact in our Training industry may be under - rather than over -whelming.

The training industry as a whole is, more often than not, a seasonal one – we have seven months in the year where we are pumping at full capacity, and then five where many companies like ours are just at ‘water level’, often even below. It just so happens that the 6-7 weeks over which the games and festivities will be held this year fall slap-bang in the middle of our peak training season!

We’ve been having the obvious conversations with our customers about it too – some very involved in the events, and others not at all. Those very involved have kindly informed us that they will not be seeing our cheerful faces in their corridors during the event; it’s all hands on deck, and they won’t be able to release any of their employees during the peak season for training. So our challenge will be to catch up on lost time once the final goals have been scored, and everyone turns back to ‘business as usual’. Not a train smash – it will definitely put our resources under pressure to deliver bigger volumes during shorter time spans, but at least we’ll still be able to rely on the annual revenue as a company, and having these conversations now allow both us and our clients to plan appropriately so we’re all ready to deliver when the last whistle blows.

I’m much more concerned about our corporate clients who are not directly involved in the World Cup. Our conversations with them are much less clear: “We’re not sure how this will impact us, so we’re going to wait and see’. No planning in advance, no confirmation and booking of training dates and facilitators, no real insight into how the event will affect the business as a whole, or the staff productivity during that time.

From where I’m standing, the World Cup time seems like a brilliant time to plan for upskilling of staff. If normal workforce activity naturally reduces at this time, what better way to fill up time with in-house training?

Of course, the staff themselves may not particularly welcome training programmes that impact on their potential game-viewing time during work, but I suppose workplaces will have to take a view on that and decide how much game time their people can reasonably expect to have without damaging company productivity and sustainability.

And, possibly, training vendors who step up to supporting company training initiatives during this time may have to get creative about structuring training sessions around key game times (and possible on-site TVs) so that they don’t end up with highly reluctant learners resenting every minute they spend in the classroom.

It’s a tough call. I think the important thing is that managers consider the different possibilities about staff productivity during the World Cup. Thinking through a few scenarios and having back-up plans in place with their training providers during that time will mean that we don’t lose unreasonable numbers of valuable man hours during the event, and that we don’t all reach the end of 2010 with sad holes in our revenue streams that reflect a negative impact of the “Event-That-Was”.

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