Unkept Promises - Strategy Consultant The Hartford Employee Review

The Hartford highly valued their employee's work/life balance through flexible work arrangement. They promoted diversity, believed that bringing your authentic self to work improved engagement and optimized results. Performance based merit and career progression. Environmentally passionate about reducing carbon footprint. Recognized importance of mental health at home and in the workplace. That company no longer exists as of 1/2/2024. On that day 40% of the remote workforce will be required to return to the office Tues-Thurs each week. That selection is the result of placing a pin in a map and drawing a 25-mile circle around 8 physical locations, then calculating the distance of employee home addresses to an office and mandating that if you lived within 25 miles of one of those sites you had to work in office T-W-Th. No exceptions unless it falls within FMLA or ADA Guidelines. This includes employees that were hired as full-time remote employees and those who haven't worked in an office for 10-15 years. It includes those who will still use Teams to communicate as none of the teammates work at the location they are required to attend. To add further insult, the 60% of the workforce living outside of the 25-mile rule are now considered unqualified for internal postings as they are unable to report a physical location. This is the same behavior we are seeing from many corporations recently. There is no data to support their position. After being told for the past 4 years how successful we have been in a virtual environment, sadly we are now no more than a head count of seats in office.