Cigna can't keep expecting fewer employees to carry the burden of every cost cutting decision. Leadership needs to own the situation, hire enough people, and stop treating fair pay as an afterthought.
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@b8 spot on. Don’t forget the reduction in the education reimbursement program. Used to but an amazing company to work for. Corporate greed took over.
@b8 thank you for sharing your story - it was very insightful and a sad story in the end.
Corporate greed has taken over like politicians everyone just wants to milk the cow get rich and kick the can and pass it onto the next BE.
Nothing ever changes for the better it’s the changes you mention that turned what used to be a great company to be passionate about our work.
I am ashamed to tell family friends and neighbors how bad it is at Cigna they shake their heads in disbelief.
I can’t wait to find a better company to move on and start a new chapter.
Cigna: 32 Years of Watching an Organization Change — And Not for the Better
After 32 years with Cigna, I can say with confidence that workforce attrition has been a recurring corporate strategy for as long as I can remember. Just when you think Cigna couldn't sink any lower or corporate greed couldn't climb any higher, give it another minute. Unfortunately, this has been the Cigna way for years under the Cordani model.
I am a Band 4, work-at-home employee and have been working remotely for more than 20 years. My current team, including my director, is spread across the country. I have no team members in my physical work location. Over the years, I've watched a series of corporate decisions that, in my opinion, have had one common objective: reduce the workforce, cut costs, and make employment increasingly undesirable so employees will leave voluntarily rather than Cigna having to make those decisions for them.
The first warning sign: Work-at-home policy changes.
One of the earliest signs was Cigna's decision to stop paying for dedicated internet service for work-at-home employees below certain job grades. This was particularly telling because a dedicated internet connection, paid for by Cigna, had previously been a requirement of the work-at-home arrangement.
Suddenly, that requirement disappeared. Employees were now expected to use their personal home internet instead.
It was an abrupt reversal of a long-standing policy and, to me, an early indication of where things were headed: reduce employee benefits and shift costs away from the company.
Return to office: Collaboration or calculated attrition?
Following COVID, Cigna publicly discussed returning employees who had transitioned to work-at-home arrangements during the pandemic to the office. Instead, the company expanded its return-to-office mandate to employees who had been working remotely long before COVID.
I had already been working from home for approximately 15 years, yet I was suddenly expected to return to an office for the sake of face-to-face collaboration.
With my entire team located across the country, what exactly was I supposed to collaborate on face-to-face? My meetings, Webex calls, and day-to-day interactions would remain virtual, whether I was sitting in an office or working from home.
The justification simply didn't make sense. I believe the policy was designed, at least in part, to encourage attrition. Make the working environment less convenient, less flexible, and increasingly frustrating, and employees will eventually leave voluntarily.
I personally know many employees who resigned as a direct result of this policy. Cigna got exactly what such a strategy would accomplish: employees leaving without the company having to initiate a termination or provide traditional severance.
I told my manager at the time that I would resign rather than return to the office. Fortunately, she encouraged me to pursue an ADA accommodation. I qualified, submitted the necessary documentation, and was approved for permanent work-at-home status.
But Cigna wasn't finished. The executive leadership team doubled down with mandatory anchor days, badge swipes, and online-presence tracking to monitor compliance. Once again, the company introduced another layer of employee scrutiny and inconvenience. It was difficult not to see this as another attempt to push people toward the exit.
Quiet layoffs, WARN Act concerns, and voluntary retirement incentives.
While the return-to-office policies were unfolding, Cigna continued conducting layoffs with very little public transparency or meaningful communication from executive leadership.
One of my biggest concerns is how these workforce reductions have been handled in relation to the federal WARN Act, which is intended to protect employees by requiring advance notice of certain mass layoffs and plant closings.
I strongly question whether Cigna has been structuring, staggering, or executing workforce reductions in ways that minimize the likelihood of triggering WARN notification requirements. Rather than openly announcing significant workforce reductions, employees appear to experience a continuing series of smaller, seemingly disconnected layoffs.
Whether these strategies technically satisfy the law is a legal question, but the broader concern remains: are workforce reductions being structured to stay below notification thresholds and avoid the transparency and accountability that WARN was intended to provide?
If the company is making substantial workforce reductions, employees deserve transparency. They shouldn't have to piece together what is happening through rumors, individual terminations, and the occasional news report.
And let's not forget what followed: the Voluntary Retirement Program (VRP).
In my opinion, this was another calculated workforce-reduction strategy. Long-tenured employees generally represent a higher compensation and benefits expense, making them an obvious target when a corporation is looking to reduce overhead.
The VRP offered relatively little beyond a traditional severance package, with the more significant benefit being a greater subsidy for COBRA healthcare coverage. The voluntary nature of the program also generally meant employees would not qualify for unemployment benefits in the same way they might following an involuntary separation, subject to applicable state law.
Once again, Cigna benefited from reducing its workforce while employees were left to navigate the financial consequences of leaving as well as protecting themselves against age and tenure discrimination lawsuits if they had gone the route of layoffs versus voluntary retirement.
The Medicare Advantage sale: Another corporate cost-saving decision.
The sale of Cigna's Medicare Advantage business to Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) was another major turning point.
Let's not overlook the documented federal Medicare fraud cases involving Cigna. The Department of Justice pursued False Claims Act actions involving allegations that Cigna submitted unsupported and inaccurate patient diagnoses to inflate Medicare Advantage payments from the federal government.
These were not simply accusations that disappeared. In September 2023, Cigna agreed to pay $172.3 million to resolve federal False Claims Act allegations. In a separate $37 million settlement, Cigna made extensive factual admissions and accepted responsibility for certain conduct involving its Medicare Advantage diagnosis practices. The HHS Office of Inspector General also required a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement with additional compliance oversight.
Think about that for a moment. An organization entrusted with administering healthcare benefits for millions of people was found to have serious problems involving the accuracy of diagnoses used to increase government payments.
From a corporate standpoint, exiting Medicare Advantage also eliminated a complicated business line with significant regulatory and financial exposure. I can't help but question whether the decision to sell was as much about reducing that exposure as it was about the company's stated strategic priorities.
And what about the employees? Many were transferred to HCSC as part of the transaction, creating yet another workforce disruption in the name of corporate strategy.
Once again, the corporation moved forward with its business objectives while employees were left dealing with the consequences. I know for me this impacted me by 2 co-workers being sacrificed through the sale and we were not able to backfill those positions but rather the current staff to absorb their work.
A new CEO, but is anything really changing?
Now we have David Cordani stepping down as CEO and Brian Evanko taking over.
I wouldn't be too quick to assume this represents a change in direction. Cordani remains Chairman of the Board, and the board continues to have significant influence over the company's strategic direction. In my view, this leadership transition may be more about optics and reassuring shareholders than fundamentally changing the way Cigna operates.
Then there's the latest messaging: "Lead to One."
I interpret this initiative as another major restructuring effort, with AI, offshore operations, and consolidation becoming the primary drivers of the company's future operating model.
How many times have we been down this road with offshore outsourcing? In my 32 years at Cigna, I've watched the company pursue offshore solutions repeatedly, only to see them fall short of expectations. Lower labor costs may look attractive on a spreadsheet, but they don't automatically translate into better quality, efficiency, or long-term business results.
Historically, these initiatives have often felt like short-term cost-saving fixes rather than sustainable solutions.
And then there's AI.
I absolutely recognize that Cigna needs to embrace AI and take advantage of what the technology can offer. There is no question that AI will change the industry. However, the pace and aggressiveness of this transformation, particularly when combined with offshore expansion and continued workforce reductions, raise legitimate concerns.
I can't help but wonder whether the ultimate objective of "Lead to One" is to eventually make AI the one workforce solution Cigna is counting on.
The bottom line: After 32 years, employees deserve to know where they stand.
After 32 years, I've watched Cigna evolve from an organization that valued experience, loyalty, and its employees into one that increasingly appears driven by quarterly financial results, cost reduction, and shareholder expectations.
Work-at-home restrictions, return-to-office mandates, quiet layoffs, WARN Act concerns, voluntary retirement incentives, business divestitures, offshore outsourcing, and now aggressive AI initiatives may each be presented as independent business decisions. But when viewed together over time, they paint a much larger picture.
The common thread is a corporate culture that increasingly treats employees as expenses to be eliminated rather than people who contribute value to the organization.
Let's be honest. I don't believe Cigna's upper echelon — its Board of Directors, executive leadership, and shareholders — loses much sleep over what these decisions mean for the employees who have dedicated years, sometimes decades, of their lives to this company. Their priorities appear to be profitability, stock performance, reduced operating expenses, and maximizing returns.
And where does that leave the employees?
The people who built this organization, carried its institutional knowledge, supported its customers, worked through countless reorganizations, adapted to changing technology, and remained loyal through decades of corporate change?
Apparently, increasingly expendable.
My message to current Cigna employees is simple: Stop confusing your personal loyalty to this company with the company's loyalty to you. They are not the same thing.
After 32 years, I never imagined I would feel this way about an organization to which I dedicated so much of my career. But the Cigna I started with is long gone.
Don't assume that your years of service, institutional knowledge, dedication, or willingness to go above and beyond will protect you. Corporate priorities change, strategies change, leadership changes, and employees are expected to simply adapt — or get out of the way.
At the end of the day, Cigna's decisions increasingly demonstrate where its priorities lie. It isn't about taking care of the employees who built the company. It's about taking care of the bottom line and the people at the top who benefit from it.
After 32 years, that's a pretty disappointing realization, but one I believe every Cigna employee should understand.
Full transparency....i have used AI to organize my personal 32 year observations and brain dump to organize my thoughts into a more consice and consumable write up. The way I think general use of AI can be beneficial to average users but no mistake, these are my thoughts and observations.
They actually can and will demand just that.
The entire economy is in a race to the bottom. Grab all that you can on the way down and plan ahead.
@OP The Cigna Group reported a full-year shareholders' net income of $5.957 billion for 2025. This represents an approximate 73.5% increase compared to the $3.434 billion reported in 2024.
THE GREED IS REMARKABLE.