March Madness? Your boss might be watching you

When March Madness starts today, some worry 19 days of distraction could drive employers mad. But other companies are giving in and even hosting the festivities.

The annual frenzy over the NCAA men's college basketball tournament inspires countless betting pools and hours spent with basketball on the brain. It's a national obsession that consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimate could cost companies more than $1.2 billion in lost productivity.

Thanks to technology, sneaking a peak at the action from your desk is easier than ever before. NCAAsports.com offers free "March Madness On Demand" streaming video of games not being aired locally at that moment. A "boss button" transforms the screen into a spreadsheet in an instant to hide the evidence. Yahoo!'s Tournament Pick'em is but one example of a service that lets fans put their brackets online, follow their progress and compare results with friends.

But now employers have their own technology arsenal, and they are prepared to use it.

Some are secretly installing software that can tell who is going to game sites, betting online or sending mass e-mails with tournament picks.

What can they see? Pretty much everything.

"Our tool essentially records everything you do on the computer and everything you do on the Internet," said Douglas Fowler, president of SpectorSoft, a Florida company that bills itself as the "world's best selling spyware."

SpectorSoft is taking advantage of March Madness to promote its monitoring and surveillance software to employers at times when Internet temptation peaks: March Madness, the Super Bowl, the World Series and, yes, the dreaded Christmas shopping season.

"A couple of things get employers interested: loss of productivity in general, and a lot of employees spending a certain percentage of time each day on non-work related Web sites," Fowler said.

He should know — he admits to once being a Web surfing slacker himself.

Besides snooping spouses and protective parents, SpectorSoft's 10,000 customers include banks, insurance companies, law firms, airlines, newspapers and even the world's largest software company, Fowler said. For all those 24/7 basketball fanatics in Redmond, that means you. (Note to boss: That afternoon browsing vacation rentals on craigslist was really research.)

"An employer can see what an employee does each and every second," SpectorSoft claims. Revealing the evidence stops fun in its tracks.

"The problem was game-playing and personal stuff," noted one company executive from RCS Communications in Louisville, Ky., who used the program. "We could have terminated several people. But the problem was so widespread, and because some of the employees were considered quite valuable, we distributed the pictures anonymously. ... The game-playing stopped cold."

Luckily for basketball fans, the Big Brother strategy isn't the one most employers are taking this year. Many are simply giving in.

Challenger found only 6 percent of employers it surveyed will take measures to prevent March Madness productivity loss. In fact, almost one-fourth of the companies said they plan to embrace the revelry, showing games on televisions in conference rooms and allowing office pools to flourish.

Once in while, workaholic Americans just need a release. For people in high-pressure jobs, surfing the Web is like taking a coffee break, said Joe LePla, principal at Seattle public relations firm Parker LePla.

"If someone was totally a March Madness aficionado and they wanted to break early to see a game, we'd say no problem," LePla said. "We might even make a group party out of it. If you want to keep employees long term, they really do need to enjoy the job."