I suspect life continues as normal at your place of business this week and you're surviving the corporate Armageddon some would have us believe occurs every year about this time—that great scourge, the annual NCAA men's Division I basketball tournament.

The tournament and associated distractions posed to workers by the sirens' songs of office pools and online coverage could have cost U.S. employers up to $1.8 billion in lost productivity last week, according to the annual prognostications of noted March Madness Cassandras, the Chicago-based outsourcing consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Of the many threats to business posed by the Big Dance, none is more treacherous, of course, than the live online broadcasts offered by CBS Sports and the NCAA.

I wrote about this subject a few years back when CBS first announced plans to offer game coverage free online. I don't remember March Madness bringing the economy to its knees that year, or in the years since then.

Heck, maybe if some of the financial engineers on Wall Street had spent a little more time following college basketball and a little less time crafting exotic mortgage-backed securities, the economy wouldn't have crashed in fall 2008.

In an item posted this month on Challenger's @Work blog, the firm explains its lost productivity estimate is based on a 2009 Microsoft/MSN survey that found that 45% of Americans planned to enter at least one college basketball pool.

Assuming the same rate this year, Challenger applied that percentage to total payroll employment and average weekly earnings data, along with an assumption that workers would waste (waste?!?) at least 20 minutes per day last week on tournament-related activities.

Of course, this doesn't take into account the impact of workers remaining at their desks beyond their normal work hours, completing the tasks they were working on as they occasionally checked scores last Thursday or Friday.

And, needless to say, none of this considers the productivity gains attributable to the wonderful impact of technology in allowing employees to conduct work-related tasks on their own time, checking BlackBerrys, logging on to e-mail, etc., from home to take care of business.

There are some among those who analyze and consult on such things who suggest that, in fact, the tournament and pools provide office bonding experiences that many companies might pay consultants thousands of dollars to create.

And even Challenger seems to have softened its view on the tournament.

In the blog post, John Challenger, the firm's CEO, conceded that portable technology makes his firm's productivity loss estimate “probably about as accurate as the point spreads computed by Las Vegas bookmakers.”

He allowed that, ultimately, employers “may or may not see a significant impact.” And, going a step further, he acknowledged that given the stress many workers have been experiencing in this economy, the tournament actually might be a workplace tonic. “With worker stress and anxiety heightened, a little distraction could be just what the doctor ordered,” Mr. Challenger wrote.

So, again, I hope your company survived last week's onslaught with its productivity intact. And I hope your brackets didn't take too bad a beating last weekend, and that your favorite team is dancing its way to the Sweet 16.