The return-to-office movement has triggered a quiet crisis few companies saw coming: what do you do when employees who were hired remotely, or who moved during the pandemic, are suddenly told they need to be back in Chicago, New York, or Seattle? For many organizations, the response has been awkward silence followed by a frantic scramble.

The New Geography of Work

Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed a reshaping of where people live and work. Between 2020 and 2022, companies threw open the doors to remote work. They closed offices, hired talent from anywhere, and promised that flexibility was the future.

Now the tide is turning. But while changing a policy is easy, reversing someone’s life is not.

We’re seeing a few predictable patterns emerge. Some companies, Amazon and Dell among them, are pushing for four or five days a week back in the office. Others are landing on hybrids, asking people to come in two or three days a week, often midweek, for collaboration. A smaller group is leaving it up to managers to decide what makes sense for their teams.

Each of these models carries its own relocation challenges. Hybrid setups often mean longer commutes or small-radius moves. Full mandates force a binary choice: move or leave. The flexible ones can be even trickier; uncertainty can be worse than either extreme.

When Relocation Becomes an Ultimatum

The employees caught in the middle tend to fall into a few camps. There are those hired remotely who never lived near an office. There are those who moved away, with company approval, during the pandemic. And then there are those who just drifted farther out, assuming the flexibility would last.

Now they’re being told to come back. Or else.

Relocation support, when offered at all, is all over the map. At the top end—usually reserved for executives or irreplaceable talent—you still see traditional relocation packages: home sale help, purchase assistance, temporary housing, the works. That’s the exception.

More commonly, companies hand out lump sums between $5,000 and $15,000. Enough to hire movers and cover a deposit, but nowhere near enough to sell a home and start over. Increasingly, some offer nothing. The message is blunt: this is where the job is— figure it out. You have 60 or 90 days.

The Math That Doesn’t Add Up

From a business standpoint, this is where things stop making sense. Many companies are basing decisions on real estate costs and leadership philosophy, not on talent economics.

If you’re paying someone $150,000 and they’re doing great work, does it really make sense to lose them rather than spend $20,000 to help them relocate? The cost to replace that person, recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, easily exceeds that. Yet we see this pattern again and again.

Some of it is intentional. Quiet layoffs disguised as “return-to-office” policies let companies shed headcount without severance or PR risk. But for organizations that genuinely want to keep their people, the lack of relocation support is baffling. They’re losing good employees over what amounts to a rounding error in the real estate budget.