A week into 2025, the return-to-office crackdown is already in full swing after WPP, the British FTSE 100–listed ad behemoth, sent a memo to its staffers ordering them back into office at least four days a week.
Until now, the company has had a hybrid work setup, with some employees working as little as one day a week in the office. But starting April, WPP will require its staff to "spend an average of four days a week in the office," according to a memo sent by CEO Mark Read on Tuesday.
"I believe that we do our best work when we are together in person," Read wrote in the memo seen by Fortune.
WPP, which owns creative agencies Ogilvy and GroupM, employs 114,000 employees across the world, according to the company's 2023 annual report.
A spokesperson at WPP told Fortune that the new mandate will apply to everyone, regardless of which agency within WPP they belong to, excluding those with existing remote work contracts in place.
Read added, however, that a tighter RTO mandate "doesn’t mean we’re going back to old ways of doing things." While people's circumstances will be taken into account to provide flexibility, they will have to put in requests for future arrangements, "including for those with caring responsibilities, health issues, and other considerations."
In the memo, Read also added that staff could turn to "an AI-powered chat agent" to help address any questions they have relating to the RTO ramp-up.
WPP is the latest of a slew of large corporations that are paring back their flexible work policies in favor of more days in the office. The reversal has been underway for a few years now, with 2024 bringing several major examples.
Take Amazon: The company's sweeping RTO mandate spelled the end of work-from-home arrangements that employees had long been adjusted to. It drew much ire from its employees, who began "rage-applying" for new jobs in response to the five-days-in-office decision (for which Amazon has since had to delay the timeline due to a lack of space).
Examples abound closer to WPP's home too. High street cosmetics retailer Boots called workers back to the office in March, while BT, the telecoms company, also told its office-based employees to come to the office three days a week from this year onward. Nothing, the London-headquartered gadget maker, told its staff in August that "remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed."
Spanish bank Santander tightened rules around in-person attendance in September.
The mood music around workplace flexibility is clearly shifting, with more leaders criticizing remote work as a possible career impeder. Debbie Crosbie of the Nationwide Building Society said that women, in particular, stand to lose from opting to work remotely.
2025 could be the year that employers try to achieve a delicate balance between ensuring employees are satisfied at work and requiring them to be present in offices more. That could mean more companies being decisive about how much flexibility they're willing to give employees, Jennie Rogerson, global head of people at Canva, told Fortune.
