Remote workers are taking a cue from college students. Rather than working 9 to 5, they’re spreading work out to off hours. That means that late afternoons, for instance, are fair game for doing something fun. If you’re planning to work later that night, after all, why not?
One beneficiary of the shift to remote work, it appears, is golf courses. According to Stanford researchers, working from home “has powered a huge boom in golfing.”
The researchers, Nick Bloom and Alex Finan, studied data from the company Inrix for 3,400-plus golf courses and shared their findings in a recent research paper entitled “How Working from Home boosted Golf.”
Comparing Wednesday in 2022 to the same day in 2019, they found a 143% increase in golfers playing more golf on that day, and a 278% jump in them playing on that day in the mid-afternoon.
The most likely explanation, they write, is that “employees are golfing as breaks while working from home.”
But that doesn’t mean productivity takes a hit, they note. “If employees make up the time later, “then this does not reduce productivity. Indeed, national productivity during/post pandemic has been strong.”
And, they note, the shift helps golf courses as well: “Golf courses are getting higher usage by spreading playing across the day and week, avoiding weekend and pre/post work peak-loading. This will raise ‘golf productivity’—the number of golf courses played (and revenue raised) per course.”
But, Bloom noted in a tweet on March 11, fully remote work-from-home “is declining. Some jobs are going hybrid as bosses drag employees back 2 or 3 days a week.”
As Fortune reported in January, more CEOs, including at Disney and Starbucks, are demanding that workers start returning to office.
In the long run, Bloom estimates, hybrid work-from-home arrangements will be 50% of jobs, fully in-person 40%, and fully-remote 10%.
As a result of shift, he says, the economy has been…