🔒Travelers Cos. among region’s insurers doing major office renovations

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Travelers Cos. executive Donna Grici has the workplace flexibility and comfort of 6,500 of her fellow downtown Hartford co-workers top of mind.

After spending $55 million on major renovations to the exterior of its iconic Travelers Tower, outside plaza and parking garage, one of Hartford’s largest private employers — if not the largest — is now in the midst of a major interior office-space makeover as the more than century-old property and casualty insurer tries to bring its workspaces into the 21st century.

Renovations that include interior-space upgrades, along with new furnishings, office equipment and digital wiring and wireless interconnections, are currently wrapping up on the final floors of the Travelers Plaza Building, which adjoins the century-old Travelers Tower at 1 Tower Square.

The company is also revamping its 51-year-old Windsor Street facility that once served as a data center.

The interior upgrades, which began in 2017 and will be completed on its Hartford properties by late 2021, come only a few years after the company spent tens of millions of dollars on extensive renovations to its Travelers Tower, and redoing its outside patio area — now called Fishman Plaza after late executive chairman Jay Fishman who died in 2016 from ALS — to make it more welcoming to workers, customers and guests.

“This is a Travelers-wide initiative,’’ Grici, the company’s second vice president for administrative services, said of the upgrades.

The investment by Travelers is good news for Hartford because it signals the New York-based company is committed to its sizable downtown presence. In addition to owning several buildings, Travelers also leases office space in a number of downtown properties, including State House Square and the Gold Building.

At the end of 2018, Travelers was Hartford’s second-largest taxpayer with $143.2 million in assessed real estate and personal property, city records show. As of Sept. 2018, it employed about 7,400 Connecticut workers, most of whom work in the city, according to HBJ’s Book of Lists.

A pricetag for its latest office renovations wasn’t disclosed.

Meantime, Travelers isn’t the only insurance company that has given itself, or is planning, an interior facelift. The Hartford and Aetna Inc. in the last decade have spent untold sums remaking interiors at their Asylum Hill campuses, in the city’s West End, while Cigna is preparing a $90 million renovation to its historic Wilde office building in Bloomfield.

In 2011, Aetna wrapped a four-year-long, $220 million relocation of staff from its sprawling former 200-acre Middletown campus into its landmark, colonial-style Hartford headquarters building on Farmington Avenue, and its Atrium Building, at Farmington and Flower Street.

Design collaboration

Travelers collaborated with its realty adviser, CBRE, to redesign its interior office spaces, Grici said. But the first step was to survey Travelers employees about what they wanted their redesigned spaces to look like.

Indeed, the biggest hurdle to the makeover was getting employee buy-in, Grici said.

“The biggest challenge is change, no matter how good things are,’’ said Grici, a 10-year Travelers veteran whose background is in human resources. “Change is hard.’’

The worker survey revealed, she said, a desire for more open work spaces flooded with more natural light.

To accommodate that, Travelers’ redesign pushed managers’ offices and conference areas from the floor perimeter and windows toward the center. That allowed placement of more workstations by windows and more natural light.

Travelers also reconfigured workstations with movable desktops that rise or descend, depending whether workers want to work standing or seated. Twin-screen computer monitors ease eye and neck strain.

Conference rooms now feature writeable “whiteboards’’ and hands-free teleconferencing sets. Also installed on the workfloor are one- or two-person sized rooms called “phone booths” in which staffers can conference with each other, or by telephone, without disrupting co-workers.

Certain floors also are equipped with a water station and unmanned canteen, which offers the typical assortment of snacks and soft drinks. Consumers pay digitally on the honor system.

Many of the upgrades Travelers is adopting reflect the latest trends in office-space design, a number of which became popular on the West Coast, particularly in the tech haven of Silicon Valley, and have slowly made there way to the East Coast and Connecticut.

In fact, more companies here — regardless of industry — are moving toward open floor plans and collaborative and flexible workspaces desired by Millennials and other next-generation workers, experts say.

Christopher Ostop, managing director in national realty broker-adviser JLL’s Hartford office, said the office-space upgrades the insurers and other tenants, large and small, undertake also reflect occupants’ desire to get more production from less office space.

“It’s not just about jamming more people into less space,” Ostop said. “People want to have more flexibility where they work. The days of showing up at your desk at 9 and sitting there most days are gone.’’

Cross-town upgrades

The Hartford’s modernization of its Asylum Hill campus began in 2013, spokesman Matthew Sturdevant said, when the company was planning to relocate about 700 workers from its Simsbury campus to its corporate headquarters.

At the time, the company said it was spending about $140 million on renovations. Its recently updated footprint features an open design that includes natural light throughout its buildings and state-of-the-art technology.

Wi-Fi was added, Sturdevant said, along with collaboration spaces to encourage teamwork; soft seating in common areas; video-conferencing capabilities; a fitness center; on-site coffee shops; and a technology help desk modeled after the Apple “Genius Bar.’’

“This investment,’’ he said, “created a more contemporary environment for our employees, providing state-of-the-art technology, work and collaboration space to encourage teamwork, creativity and high performance.”

Enough extra electric-car charging stations were installed for ChargePoint to rank The Hartford tops among private Connecticut employers for the number of car chargers offered to employees.

Energy efficiency and real-estate management helped The Hartford reduce greenhouse-gas emissions companywide by 66 percent from 2007 to 2017.

For example, the company replaced more than 8,400 fluorescent lights with more efficient LED fixtures, upgraded elevators, and gained greater HVAC efficiencies. Water fixtures were upgraded to reduce annual water consumption.

Cigna’s blueprint

In Bloomfield, Cigna is pursuing town approval to invest upwards of $90 million over a three-year period on an interior redo of its historic Wilde office building, said Jose Giner, the town’s planner and economic-development director.

In return, a pair of town subcommittees has recommended approval of Cigna’s request for a seven-year property-tax abatement — two years more than presently available under the town’s development-incentive program, Giner said.

If granted, Cigna would pay taxes on only half of any additional incremental property value over seven years arising from the upgrade, mitigating some need for project financing, Giner said. However, the town would realize an extra $8 million in tax revenue in the period from Cigna’s real estate and personal property.

A formal abatement agreement between Cigna and Bloomfield is expected in late June, Giner said.

The company declined to talk about its planned renovations.

In 2011, Cigna was the first recipient of economic assistance under Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s “First Five” program when it agreed to relocate its corporate headquarters to Bloomfield from Philadelphia, and to create hundreds of jobs.

Cigna was promised $21 million in grants and forgivable loans, plus up to $50 million in urban reinvestment tax credits, all dependent on the insurer reaching certain goals for hiring and investing in its headquarters in Bloomfield and offices in Windsor.

“We’ve utilized $12 million of the $30 million of credits earned,” Cigna spokesman Brian Henry said in an email. “We are hopeful to use the remaining $18 million over the next few years.”

CORRECTION: Not every floor in the Plaza building has a canteen. A previous version said it did.

A Connecticut Mirror report was used in this story.