Meeting up for an early tee time… at 2 on a Wednesday afternoon. Pandemic-born remote work has reshaped the modern office (#hotdesking), but it's also reshuffled non-office life. The flexibility has created a "whenever economy." Remote workers are taking advantage of their schedules to shop or work out when they'd have typically been at a downtown desk. Now they're working different hours (picture: afternoon golf games, late-evening emails). For some industries, that's been a boon:
- Printing greens: A study of 3.4K+ golf courses saw a nearly 4X jump from 2019 to 2022 in Wednesday-afternoon games. Researchers' best guess: WFH golf breaks.
- Midday blowout: According to ClassPass, last year the most popular time for salon or spa visits was noon. Before the pandemic, it was around dinner time.
- Office-chair pose: Yoga studios and rock-climbing gyms are seeing sustained midday business as remote workers downward-dog and scale walls between Zoom calls.
Slack pings to an empty desk… As big names like Amazon, Salesforce, and Meta require (or “strongly encourage”) in-person office work, they may end up looking like loud outliers. A recent survey of 1.1K corporate execs found that only 3% plan to cut down remote options, while 5% said they'll expand them. Many prospective employees are on board: remote opportunities recently attracted a majority of LinkedIn applications, despite making up only 13% of job listings.
The 9-to-5 is losing its hold… Say hello to the 9-to-whenever-it's-done. An overlooked detail of the whenever economy: workers aren't necessarily working less. A three-hour lunch break might mean a post-dinner spreadsheet sesh. That flexibility may be hard to relinquish, both for employees lovin' afternoon golf and for employers expecting late-night email replies.