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”.

The majority the team’s work, its website says, helps firms “identify, mitigate and manage reputation risks to their organisations”. And 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 very crisis management expertise with which their own company is brimming, as they find themselves engulfed in a reputational jam that even the most charitable observer would struggle to view as “unavoidable”.

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 in a company-wide memo described variously by agency employees as “causing uproar” and which had “gone down like a cup of cold sick”.

Such was the strength of feeling against the move – first revealed by City AM – that a petition set up by what claim to be a group of ‘concerned WPP employees‘, 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.”

The sudden and unilateral manner in which chief executive Mark Read announced the policy – which came two-thirds of the way down a meandering 900-word all staff email – appears to have irked staff just as much, if not more, than the decision itself; with the irony of a firm that owns several public relations agencies committing a gaffe of this nature not lost on some.

“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 AM. “It’s embarrassing.”

Even some of those 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 both the leadership’s rationale for the policy, and some staff’s vitriolic reaction to it comes in a 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 is a company that is used to being a swaggering and dominant force in global advertising. Through a combination of savvy acquisitions and an ironclad approach bottom line, it amassed a roster of award-winning and lucrative agencies, including the ad groups Ogilvy and Grey , and media giant GroupM.

But since Sorrell’s abrupt resignation in 2018, and then a pandemic-fuelled purple patch between 2020 and 2022, performance has flatlined. Leadership have been forced to instigate hiring and wage freezes across the board, and staff morale has plummeted. And the media darling of UK plc’s lethargy is evident both in the firm’s share price, which currently wallows nearly 60 per cent off its 2017 high, and the fact 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 served to aggravate the concerns voiced by disgruntled staff to City AM. Misgivings largely coalesced around the substantial added financial cost of commuting and childcare, 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.