Autodesk and Working From Home

Though most tech companies are ushering employees back to the office, Autodesk is taking the reverse approach. The software company, popular among builders and engineers, recently announced that it would not mandate a return-to-office like many of its industry peers. Instead, it has launched what it calls the flex forward program. Employees at the company continue to receive monthly perks like reimbursement for work-from-home expenses, the option to work anywhere in the world for up to 30 days annually, and a $750 home-office setup stipend. To say Autodesk's chief people officer Rebecca Pearce is a fierce advocate for flexible work would be an understatement. "I have never believed in presenteeism," she told me this week. "If you have to rely on seeing somebody in the office to know they're performing, then there are multiple failures in terms of trust and accountability within your organization."

In a conversation with Fortune, Pearce shared how the company embraces remote and hybrid work while increasing productivity. "As someone who worked flexibly at Autodesk before COVID hit us, I was already a beneficiary of a pretty progressive mindset around location strategy and access to talent. In many ways, we're continuing the journey we started more informally. The pandemic gave us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to experiment with more radical working methods. That's ultimately what culminated in the launch of our new flex forward strategy."

On the other side of the table, Sam Zell, the outspoken real estate magnate whose comments we have to edit to remain a family-friendly news source, said that remote work was "a bunch of _____." "One of the biggest lies in the world is that people working from home are more productive than people working in the office," the billionaire founder and chairman of Equity Group Investments told a New York University luncheon on Wednesday. "You have much less productivity if you're working from home in your pajamas with three little kids running around than if you're in an office." The commercial real estate legend received applause for his comments this week, but then, he was speaking to a friendly audience. NYU's Schack Institute of Real Estate hosted the luncheon as part of its annual REIT Symposium, with real estate execs and many grad students hoping to reach Zell's level of success in attendance.

In 2001, Zell founded Chicago-based Equity Office Properties Trust, which went on to become the largest owner of U.S. office property after the federal government, as well as the first real estate investment trust (REIT) to join the Standard & Poor's 500 index. Private equity firm Blackstone Group bought it for $20 billion in 2007. Zell, of course, is not a neutral observer. The shift to remote work has hammered commercial real estate (CRE), where he made much of his fortune, leading to rising vacancy rates and falling property values. Morgan Stanley analysts recently forecast something "worse than in the Great Financial Crisis" for CRE. And last month, Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that of all the economy's looming threats, the state of the CRE debt market is "by far the most serious."

Many remote workers, however, would beg to differ with Zell about working from home. In a Pew Research survey published last month, 56% of respondents said working from home helps them get work done and meet deadlines, while 37% said it neither helps nor hurts. But some of the respondents would agree with his comments on remote workers, particularly younger ones just starting their careers, being less connected to colleagues and mentors and missing out on opportunities. "Young people need to develop their skills," he said, "and you can't develop those skills if you're not in the office." He added, "I don't know how a young person who wants to be recognized-who wants to be rewarded for superior effort-can do so if the person who makes the decisions about them doesn't see them at work."

In the Pew survey, 53 percent said that working from home does hurt them in terms of how connected they feel to coworkers. Thirty-seven percent said it neither hurt nor helped, while only 10% said it helped. In terms of opportunities to be mentored, 36% said remote work hurt them. Only 10% said it helped, while 54% said it neither helped nor hurt. Zell criticized online meetings, too, arguing they can't replace face-to-face ones: "There's an enormous difference between a Zoom board meeting and a meeting in person. A Zoom board meeting is a board meeting where everyone sits and listens to recitations. An in-person meeting is where the real discussion takes place." Zell also suggested that companies, when faced with layoffs, will favor staff who work in the office over remote workers. "We're all reading about layoffs in the newspapers," he said. "It will be interesting to see what percentage of those who lost their jobs worked from home and what percentage of them are people who came into the office."

With the pandemic well in the rearview mirror, many CEOs have been demanding that employees who had grown accustomed to working from home spend more time in the office, among them Bob Iger at Disney, Robert Thomson at News Corp., and Howard Schultz at Starbucks. Like Zell, many of them have cited the benefits of in-person collaboration and noted the shortcomings of remote work.