In the next few days, a much-loved national basketball tournament will start in the US, and on countless conference calls originating there, the first few minutes will be spent talking about scores and how participants’ predictions are faring in the local office pool. They call their selections their ‘bracket.’ Many people’s bracket will be ‘busted’ after the first couple of days, which means their predictions are no longer in the running to win the pool.
They will do this even when the conference call is global.
Even for people not into college basketball, the tournament is exciting. Teams and bracket placement will be announced on March 15, and in just a few days between March 17 and March 22, 68 teams will be winnowed down to 16. A champion will be crowned 10 days later, meaning that for 23 days, talk of this tournament will dominate the first few minutes of many group calls.
For people in the US, it’s a few minutes of small talk and harmless fun. For those of us outside the US, it’s boring and a waste of time.
I’m saying this as an American male who spent a lot of time playing American sports. I even follow the miserable results of the Northwestern football program (my alma mater).
But living in Europe has taught me that no one understands or cares about our sports. In fact, living here has soured me on sports overall. After trying for a long time to care about the UEFA and World Cups, I now see most sports as millionaires chasing a ball around a field, in a match whose results will have absolutely no impact on my life. And the same is true for games played in my home country.
That opinion is not something I’m likely to bring up on a call, where the director is gently teasing someone about a team’s early exit from the tournament.
But I doubt very much that I’m the only one. These chats are alienating not just to our global colleagues, but to our colleagues in the cubicles next to us who couldn’t care less about sports.
If we truly value diversity, we should strive to keep our small talk more globally inclusive.
Talking sports with people you know to be fans is a good time with colleagues. But in larger groups, it’s dull, provincial, and exclusionary.
So knock it off.
Best practice in global conference calls is one of the topics in my book, Localizing Employee Communications: A Handbook, out now from Content Wrangler/XML Press. Read more on Amazon.
