The work from home golf boom — and the big businesses trying to put a stop to it
Fascinating research from a team of data scientists at Stanford University show how golf courses have been booming outside of normal peak tee-times, but corporations might be closing the door.
Cast your mind, for a moment, back to the spring and summer of 2020.
An unpredictable new virus was spreading (almost as fast as the dread fear that accompanied it), Governments were salivating over the unprecedented power of shelter-in-place orders and national lockdowns, and people would growl at you for standing too close in the supermarket queue.
The astonishing capabilities of the Internet, the detail of which was then overlooked or ignored by most daily commuters, retail outlet owners and policy-makers alike, soon became apparent, as a crazy percentage of businesses kept ticking over and doing fine (or even better) despite key staff being flung to the far corners of the world and connected only by Zoom, Teams and digitally shared spreadsheets.
In that era of social distancing, the game of golf boomed.
Exercise was one thing you could still do (and even—shock! horror!—were sometimes encouraged to do by the public health lords) and golf, a few miles of naturally socially-distanced walking, became the exercise of choice for a large and growing number of people for whom three-hour commutes and career-in-the-city had hitherto ruled out 18 (or 19) holes.
It’s easy to see the temptation, then.
Whereas weekends have always been the peak time for club players, suddenly weekdays too became an option.
Toggle the Team status signal to “In a meeting” and head off to the club for a mid-afternoon, and who would be any the wiser?
The data is wise to you
Well, turns out those trips—and, depending on your type of vehicle, every car journey of any type you’ve made—generated endless reams of data that have now been parsed to tell a story about just how well golf clubs have been doing on previously quiet days.
Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and expert on the work-from-home phenomenon, teamed up with Alex Finan, a research assistant at the university and also a data analyst at INRIX, a specialist in vehicle data which is (per their website) “one of the leading providers of data and insight into how people move around the world”.
Bloom and Finan combined two key pieces of data to shine a spotlight on the behaviour of thousands of tens of thousands golfers between April 2019 and November 2022—in effect painting a clear picture of the impact of the pandemic on golfer behaviour.
Those two pieces of data:
AI analysis of satellite images to identify golf courses across the United States, and pinpointing the precise GPS co-ordinates of their boundaries
Anonymized vehicle and phone GPS data to identify where drivers were going, when, and how long they stayed there
These two sources gave a wealth of information:
3400 of America’s estimated 15000+ golf courses were pinpointed by the AI
140 million car journeys a day were collated and parsed
Combining those two data sources identifed golf course visits (defined as “2 to 6 hours within the area of the golf course and park”)
Key result: Golf’s midweek boom
While the data are not complete—the report estimates that approximately 5% of total golf trips were captured—they do offer strong insight into the behaviours of club golfers over the past three years.
Saturdays, generally the peak day for the club player, were down 5% (31,500 trips measured on Saturdays in 2019 compared to to 29,800 in 2022), whereas Monday through Friday were all massively up.
2+ hour golf course visits on Wednesdays, for example, rose from 10,800 in 2019 to more than 26,000 in 2022—a jump of 143%.
Breaking down the numbers by hour-of-day, it gets even more interesting.
The researchers plucked out “Wednesday at 4pm” for the headline, with a 278% increase, but even a cursory scan of the graph shows a lot more red than blue.
Golfers everywhere were playing a lot more midweek and middle-of-the-day golf in 2022 than they were in the normal old office hour days before the pandemic.
The researchers also interviewed some players anonymously, and some of the quotes published border on the comical.
A tech executive from Palo Alto, at the centre of Silicon Valley and adjacent to Stanford, was pretty sure a work meeting was taking place in, let’s say, unusual circumstances:
I think my colleague was taking his zoom call from the golf course. He was on mute and video off, but once when he was talking I heard somebody talking about the fairway and strokes.
Corporate clawbacks
Drawing attention to this last month, the Financial Times’ Alphaville column drew a dotted line between the golf club visits data—which it called “golf' o’clock”—and the decision of JP Morgan Chase, the New York investment bank, to call time on its executives’ absence from the office.
JPMorgan Chase is asking its managing directors to be in the office five days a week and warned other employees not to fall short of their “in-office attendance expectations”.
“Our leaders play a critical role in reinforcing our culture and running our businesses,” JPMorgan’s operating committee wrote in an internal memo to staff on Wednesday, a copy of which was seen by the Financial Times. “They have to be visible on the floor, they must meet with clients, they need to teach and advise, and they should always be accessible for immediate feedback and impromptu meetings.”
Now, this could be just a JPMorgan thing.
While the world has flirted with recession, spiralling inflation, the cost-of-living crisis and economic uncertainty, it has been boomtime for JPMorgan Chase as the bank has effectively become the partner of choice of the US government during a series of bank failures in recent months—so if executives were shirking on the workload in the past, their shoulder is now firmly required at the wheel.
But the trend of wanting to bring staff back into the office five days a week is broad.
Microsoft surveyed more than 30,000 corporate workers last year and found that half of them were now either required to return to the office five days a week, or will be required to do so in the not-so-distant future.
The difference between managers and staff is stark, though, with 44% of executives preferring to work full-time at the office compared to only 17% of their subordinates.
What all of this will mean for golf, time—as per its habit—will tell.
But maybe the battle for that prime Saturday morning tee-time is about to hot up once again.