WPP's £500M restructure plan faces culture hurdle as workers resist return-to-office

When Cindy Rose took over as CEO of WPP in October 2024, she inherited a company in freefall. The advertising holding company had recently issued a profit warning after a sharp revenue decline and the loss of major clients—Coca-Cola's North American business and Mars' snacking and pet care accounts. By the end of 2024, WPP had dropped out of the FTSE 100, ending a run of nearly 30 years on the UK's blue-chip index.

Rose's response came two months into her tenure: Elevate28, an 18-month restructuring plan that dismantles WPP's traditional holding-company model and replaces it with a single business divided into four units—creative, media, production, and enterprise solutions. The plan targets £500 million in savings by 2028, though Rose acknowledged it will cost £400 million upfront to execute, with additional job cuts expected by year-end. The company had already trimmed headcount from 108,044 in 2024 to 98,655 by the end of 2025. Further reductions will fall primarily on HR and finance functions as back-office tasks are automated through AI.

To lead the cultural dimension of this transformation, Rose split WPP's top HR role in two. Mark Taylor, recruited from the Lego Group in April, took the role of global chief people officer, with remit over the structural mechanics of transformation. Marie-Claire Barker moved into a newly created role of chief people officer for performance and culture, tasked with helping the company work differently and adopt AI at scale. "Taylor's remit is very much about what this transformation looks like structurally," Barker explained to Fortune. "Mine's enabling it to happen. I'm looking at how we need to work differently, because the way people work and the way our leaders show up will be what determines whether the restructure succeeds."

That cultural challenge is formidable. For decades, WPP operated as a federation of autonomous agencies, each with its own identity, values, and culture. "For years, WPP was the parent company you went to for approvals," Barker said, adding that the hardest part of the reset is dissolving those silos. "Everyone already belongs to a strong culture somewhere else, so I'm trying to get 90,000 people to unlearn what we were doing before. We're trying to build a new WPP culture."

One immediate flashpoint is the return-to-office mandate. In Read's final year, staff were ordered back four days a week, sparking internal backlash. A petition from "concerned WPP employees" gathered more than 20,000 signatures online, with staff complaining about lengthy commutes and the policy's impact on disabled and neurodivergent workers. Barker insists the policy is staying but is reframing its purpose. "There wasn't a reason to bring staff in, it was more of a mandate," she said of the original rollout. "What's different now is that we're much more intentional about the purpose of being in the office and why our work is better when people are together."

Context matters: only 10% of workers want to work onsite according to a Gallup poll, yet more than half of Fortune 100 desk workers now operate under fully in-office policies, up sharply from a few years ago. Barker's bet is that the office itself—redesigned with shared cafes, lounges, and meeting areas where staff from different agencies mix—can become a place of belonging. She is tracking employee sentiment data and says that people with daily office attendance score higher on satisfaction and engagement. "If you've got a friend at work, you're more likely to go the extra mile. You feel like you have a place where you belong," she observed.

On AI adoption, Barker frames the technology as a unifying platform, not a threat. All AI training flows through the WPP Open platform, which staff also use for client work, with courses tiered by seniority: a creative-technology apprenticeship for entry-level staff, generative-AI fundamentals for mid-level roles, and an AI and business diploma for executives. So far, 12,000 employees have accessed the training, collectively completing 120,000 hours of learning. Barker acknowledged that early conversations around AI sparked fear—"you could really feel the fear in people"—but that fear began to ease when employees experimented hands-on with the tools. "Employees found they sparked ideas rather than replaced them," she said.

Barker's vision for culture is to make it measurable. She is running regular employee surveys and tying results directly to client satisfaction data, testing the hypothesis that happier employees lead to happier clients. She plans to introduce one shared set of values across WPP to replace the values each agency previously set for itself, and leaders will be judged on whether they live up to them. Career development will also expand, allowing staff to switch between disciplines. "We're building new opportunities for people internally to try different career paths and be more rounded," she said.

To build trust, CEO Rose is now sending monthly video updates to the global workforce explaining the restructure's logic—a departure from the old model where "one agency would restructure in isolation." This time, Barker emphasized, "the whole company is transforming together." Whether that transparency and unified messaging can overcome transformation fatigue and win over 90,000 employees used to separate agency identities remains the open question. The £500 million in savings is a measurable target; restoring WPP's culture and reputation, Barker acknowledged, may prove the bigger challenge.

WPP's decline was sharp and concrete. The company lost marquee clients—Coca-Cola's North American business and Mars' snacking and pet care accounts—and its 30-year tenure on the FTSE 100 ended in 2024. Into this turnaround stepped Cindy Rose, who diagnosed a structural problem: WPP operated as a loose federation of independent agencies, each with its own identity, values, and culture. That decentralized model once made sense but now blocks the coordination and shared capability Rose needs to restore profitability and client trust.

Elevate28 attacks this problem on three fronts. First, operational: collapsing the holding-company layer and regrouping into four functional units will strip out duplication and bureaucracy, targeting £500 million in savings by 2028. Second, technological: WPP is pushing AI adoption not as a cost-reduction tool (though back-office automation will cut HR and finance roles) but as a unifying skill. By funneling all 90,000 employees through the same WPP Open platform and tiered curriculum, the company is creating what Marie-Claire Barker, the chief people officer for performance and culture, calls "a shared knowledge" where previously siloed agencies begin to see common ground. Third, and most difficult, cultural: Barker must convince a workforce used to strong subsidiary identities to embrace a single WPP set of values and to see the four-day office mandate not as an arbitrary edict but as purposeful community-building.

The friction is real. A petition with over 20,000 signatures demonstrates that employees do not yet buy the pitch. Barker's data shows that employees with daily office attendance score higher on satisfaction, but the Gallup benchmark (only 10% of workers want to work onsite) suggests she is fighting a broader tide. Her response—reframing the office as a designed space for cross-agency connection rather than a control mechanism—is plausible but untested at scale. Whether culture can become a measurable, leadership-accountable growth lever, as Barker intends, or whether it remains aspirational rhetoric, will determine whether the £500 million in operational savings translate into a genuine turnaround.