Michael L. Diamond

@mdiamondapp

Employers who have spent lord knows how much time designing work space to maximize production and creativity, going so far as to eliminate their own office so that they can sit shoulder to shoulder with their workers, must be heartened to see the single-minded energy being devoted to the task at hand.

Their fantasy football team.

Yes, the IT guy owns a team he has called Tim Buck Two. The gal in the next cubicle over is fretting over what to do about RGIII's latest injury. Her neighbor, who just now learned that it's Stevan Ridley, not Stephen Ridley, has spent the past 15 minutes texting someone. You can't prove it, but you have a hunch that it's not a client.

What's an employer to do? Go with the flow, said Chris Mills, an employment lawyer with Fisher & Phillips in New Providence.

"I would advise a client to think long and hard before they completely stamped out accessing it," Mills said. "They aren't going to be able to do it. Why undertake a fruitless venture?"

More than 30 million people play fantasy football, costing $13 billion in productivity, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., a job recruiter.

But it's not unlawful. And an employer who tries to crack down on it is fighting a losing battle, Mills said.

For employers it falls into a category of common sense. Policies that prohibit, say, sending personal emails or checking social media or looking at a bank account during work time are likely to backfire, making employees less productive, not more.

And if an employee isn't getting their work done, take it up with them personally.

Mills has seen these cases unfold in court and it didn't sound pretty to me. One of the employee's attorney's first move is to check on Internet activity of the owner or CEO. Lo and behold, it usually showed visits to eBay or Yahoo finance or the Weather Channel.

"I almost always tell employers don't adopt a rule that you can't enforce or won't enforce," Mills said.

I really haven't played fantasy football since high school 150 years ago. All I remember is picking Donald Igwebuike, a place kicker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. So I don't even know how it works anymore.

Instead, here are my picks for Week 3:

Buffalo, Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston (Giants are bad, aren't they?), New Orleans, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Jacksonville (upset pick here), New England, Arizona, Miami, Carolina, Denver (voting with my heart), and the Jets.