Most office workers are splitting their workdays between home and the office. Golf driving ranges have been a major beneficiary. But not everyone is happy about the trend.
Back in 2019, before the pandemic, on any given weekday only about half of the golf bays at Golf Central, a driving range and mini golf complex near Brisbane Airport, were occupied during work hours.
But workplace sensor data from XY Sense suggests that workers spent more time at their desks in the first three months of this year than they had done during any quarter since the pandemic. Average office utilisation was 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2024, up nine percentage points on that recorded in the third quarter of last year.XY Sense co-founder Alex Birch and Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood linked the trend to the softening jobs market.
“With flexibility, we’re seeing people coming in and sitting there with their laptop and getting their hair done at the same time,” Schembri says. “This opened new opportunities for service businesses with bottlenecks. All of a sudden, it became feasible to go to the post office at 2pm, or see the dentist at 10am.
“We have two mechanics on each day, whereas pre-COVID we had three people on for three days, and two on for two days.”One of the big questions around work from home is what it means for productivity. It’s common to hear executives and other business types claim employees are much more productive when working with others in the office. But it often feels like every research paper that concludes remote working is bad for productivity is matched by one that finds the opposite.
Meanwhile, Wood reckons the main benefits are the opportunities for people to structure their work more flexibly, and to operate in an environment where it may be easier to concentrate.“The other big benefit is the cost of commuting,” she says, “Particularly in major cities in Sydney and Melbourne, both the time and financial cost is very real. The chance to avoid that two or three days a week produces a very real social and economic benefit.
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