‘It’s caused uproar’: Inside the fallout from WPP’s four-day office week mandate
Earlier this month, WPP’s Mark Read sent an all-staff memo ordering employees back into the office for four days a week. With staff fearing an exodus of talent and a petition calling on the policy to be revoked, reaching nearly 20,000 signatures, Ali Lyon tells the inside story of a firm known for its brand expertise suffering high-profile brand damage to its own.
The crack team of public relations gurus at Burson have won a fast-earned reputation for getting their clients out of regrettable predicaments.
Forged after WPP’s decision to merge its two flagship communications agencies last year, the agency boasts an award-winning crisis management division that prides itself on its ability to steer the biggest names in business “safely through any crisis”.
Its website says most of the team’s work helps firms “identify, mitigate and manage reputation risks to their organisations”. Only “when crises are unavoidable” will they “help clients successfully manage it – anytime, anywhere”.
Today, WPP’s top brass will be ruing the fact they didn’t lean more on the crisis management acumen in their own agency.
The FTSE 100 ad giant is facing a mutiny among its 110,000 staff after chief executive Mark Read ordered them back into the office for at least four days a week. The decision, announced in a company-wide memo, has been described variously by agency employees as “causing uproar” and having “gone down like a cup of cold sick”.
Such was the strength of feeling against the move – first revealed by City PM – that a petition set up by group who claim to be ‘concerned WPP employees‘, has racked up 15,000 signatures in just under a week.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s universally unpopular among colleagues,” says a senior staffer at one of WPP’s European offices.
As far as I’m aware, nobody knew this was coming. There was no prior warning.
An embarrassing PR nightmare
The sudden and unilateral manner in which chief executive Mark Read announced the policy appears to have irked staff just as much, if not more, than the decision itself.
The return-to-office mandate came two-thirds of the way down a meandering 900-word all staff email.
“The way it was dumped in an email was so poor for a communications company,” wrote one disgruntled senior executive in a survey of petition signatories shared with City PM. “It’s embarrassing.”
Even some who support the rationale behind the move feel the announcement was bungled.
A brand strategist looking forward to the improved creative atmosphere that a more vibrant office will bring felt the announcement would have been better received had it come from managers or, failing that, individual agency bosses.
“It just feels authoritarian,” she says. “We don’t really know who [Mark Read] is. Of course he’s a very busy man and it’s a huge global company. So if it was from someone who walks the corridors and is a friendly face, it probably lands very differently.”
To the external observer, the bitter and public fallout from the decision that has commanded weeks of headlines in the trade press could be seen as the innocent result of an isolated, unforced error.
But the leadership’s rationale for the policy and some staff’s vitriolic reaction to it comes in the context of a bruising three years for staff and leadership alike.
A world-leading agency struggling
Thanks to Sir Martin Sorrell’s all-powerful and, at times, controversial reign, WPP has become accustomed to being a swaggering presence in global advertising.
Through a combination of savvy acquisitions and an ironclad approach to its bottom line, it amassed a roster of award-winning and lucrative agencies, including the ad groups Ogilvy and Grey, and media giant GroupM.
But barring a a pandemic-fuelled sugar rush between 2020 and 2022, performance has flatlined since Sorrell’s abrupt resignation in 2018.
Leadership has been forced to instigate hiring and wage freezes, and, consequentlym staff morale has plummeted.
The media darling of UK plc’s lethargy is evident both in the firm’s share price and decline from its position at the head of the industry that it once dominated. It will lose its position as the world’s largest holding company to French rival Publicis in March, just days before Mr Read’s new policy comes in.
This backdrop of on-and-off wage and promotion freezes has undoubtedly aggravated the concerns voiced by disgruntled staff to City PM.
Misgivings largely coalesced around the substantial added financial cost of commuting and childcare and what it will mean for diversity among the WPP rank and file. But they also extend to more trivial matters; ones that betray a firm that isn’t fully prepared to instigate its own policy.
“We’re already struggling to find places to sit and meeting rooms to use,” says an ad agency director. “And in the FAQ sent round after we were [essentially] just told, ‘There will be teething problems but that doesn’t matter.'”
These concerns are not universal – City PM spoke to a strategist and a senior public relations director, both of whom trumpeted to improved office workplace that a better attended office would bring.
Recruiters come knocking
But of the majority against the move, the overriding fear voiced to City PM was what it would mean for WPP’s ability to attract and retain some of the industry’s brightest and most ambitious talent.
Just hours after the new working pattern was announced, an entrepreneurial rival agency released a tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn post listing its vacancies and inviting WPP staff to apply. And in the cut-throat world of recruitment, it didn’t take long for commission-driven agents to spot a lucrative new pool of potential candidates.
“Our team’s already actively targeting WPP staff in the likelihood they’re feeling disillusioned about the new policy,” says Dean Connelly, the founder LATTE, a PR recruitment agency. “I think it’s going to be incredibly detrimental to both their talent attraction and their retention.”
Connelly points to his agency’s regular industry surveys as evidence, the most recent of which found that 95 per cent of employees in the PR industry want to work three days a week in the office.
“We only have one client out of about 30 agencies that we work with that is successfully running four days a week in the office and still attracting talent,” he adds.
His is a view reflected across much of the industry’s recruiters, even those who actively place candidates with WPP-owned firms.
“The group has some brilliant agencies,” says Davina Williamson, a director at 6 Degrees who has for decades worked with the likes of Burson and its predecessor agencies – Hill & Knowlton and BCW. “[But] my job of recruiting for them will absolutely be harder because of this move – not least because of the publicity it’s attracted.”
Employee churn
In his email to staff, Read explicitly said he felt WPP’s illustrious client base would support their agency teams spending more time in the office, writing that many of them were “expecting [higher office attendance] from the teams who work with them”.
But far more damaging to those clients, argues an agency director, would be a situation where an exodus in staff triggers a major churn in their client teams. “With the wave of people being very vocal across the globe, what message is that sending to clients? They’re going to be panicking saying, ‘Is my whole team going to leave?'” she says.
Some execs believe Read’s bark is bigger than his bite. The FAQs document circulated among staff alongside the memo said that non-compliance would result in disciplinary measures “up to and including termination of employment”.
But City PM has learned of at least one agency chief executive telling staff they only plan to implement the policy “in the spirit it was intended”, while another local market head has told their colleagues “to basically disregard it” come its introduction in April.
A spokeswoman for WPP said that the firm continues to believe the move “is the right policy for the long-term interests of the company as a whole and the careers of our people”. And assured staff that between now and the Spring it would “take the time to implement it in a collaborative and pragmatic way with our teams [and introduce a] clear process to request additional flexibility”.
In that time, WPP’s leadership will also need to arrest a damaging public relations storm that risks spilling into a third week. Spanning across Linkedin feeds, the pages of advertising trade magazines and even onto Tiktok, one could argue it is the sort of reputational fallout that argue requires the attention of a revered team of crisis management experts.
It would be a happy coincidence were Read and his senior colleagues to find in their own four walls an industry-leading agency that claims to excel at helping clients “transition from crisis response, to reputation recovery“.