When a medium-sized consultancy announced that employees could work from anywhere, the policy was praised as unusually progressive. Six months later, however, the company restricted remote work to locations within three time zones of its main offices. Critics called this a reversal; managers described it as a refinement. The problem had not been productivity, which had actually risen. Instead, the costs of coordination were unevenly distributed. Senior staff repeatedly rearranged their schedules, newer colleagues hesitated to request help outside local working hours, and informal mentoring declined.\n\nThe lesson is not that flexibility fails. Rather, policies presented as equally beneficial may transfer hidden costs to the employees with the least influence. A sustainable arrangement therefore depends less on offering maximum freedom than on making trade-offs explicit and revisiting them with the people most affected. The consultancy’s revised policy introduced core collaboration hours and allowed quarterly exemptions. It looked less generous on paper, yet employee satisfaction recovered. What mattered was not unrestricted choice, but predictable choice within constraints that people understood.