When Cindy Rose replaced Mark Read as CEO of WPP in October last year, she inherited a business in decline. The advertising company had recently issued a fresh profit warning after a sharp decline in revenues and the loss of key clients, including Coca-Cola’s North American business and Mars’ snacking and pet care accounts. Two months later, WPP dropped out of the FTSE 100, ending a near 30-year run on the blue-chip index.
Rose responded with an 18-month plan to scrap WPP’s holding-company structure and replace it with a single business split into four units: creative, media, production, and enterprise solutions. The restructuring plan, called Elevate28, aims to achieve £500 million in savings by 2028, but is estimated to cost £400 million, with more job cuts expected by the end of the year.
Marie-Claire Barker, the WPP’s chief people officer for performance and culture, has been tasked with helping to implement the new strategy, improve employee performance, and increase AI adoption.
To support the restructure, WPP split its top HR role in two. Mark Taylor joined WPP from the Lego Group in April as global chief people officer, while Marie-Claire Barker moved into a newly created role of chief people officer, performance and culture.
“Taylor’s remit is very much about what this transformation looks like structurally,” Barker tells 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.”
Return-to-office backlash
For WPP employees, the restructure is the latest in a series of upheavals. Headcount has already been cut from 108,044 in 2024 to 98,655 at the end of 2025, according to WPP’s latest filings. Read’s final year was also marked by internal unrest after staff were ordered back into the office at least four days a week.
A petition from “concerned WPP employees” demanding the policy be scrapped gathered more than 20,000 signatures online, with employees complaining about lengthy commutes and the impact on disabled and neurodivergent staff.
However, Barker maintains the policy is staying; what’s changing is the reasoning. “There wasn’t a reason to bring staff in, it was more of a mandate,” she says 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.”
Winning staff over on a return-to-office mandate is a hurdle many executives will recognize. Only 10% of workers want to work onsite, according to a Gallup poll. Yet more than half of Fortune 100 desk workers now work under fully in-office policies, according to real estate firm JLL, up sharply from a few years ago, when most companies still ran hybrid schedules.
At WPP, Barker’s focus is building communities inside the office. “We have beautiful offices around the world,” she says. “We’ve been very intentional about how we design our workspaces, and we make them places where people feel comfortable. But it’s a journey.” Much of each building’s space is shared—cafes, lounges, and meeting areas where staff from different agencies mix—alongside quiet areas for focused work.
Barker is tracking employee sentiment data to assess whether the return to office has been successful. She 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 says.
The restructure will also involve further job cuts. These will primarily impact the HR and finance functions, Barker says, as back-office operations are streamlined and tasks are automated through AI.
AI as a ‘common curriculum’
Increasing AI adoption represents a cultural challenge for Barker. “Most industry conversations about AI get stuck on capability—what the tech can do—and leave out culture entirely,” she says.
Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report found executives fixate on AI integration and workforce redesign while HR leaders tend to focus on employee experience and talent processes. This misalignment, the report warns, could slow transformation down.
All of WPP’s AI training is available through its WPP Open platform, which staff also use for client work. Courses are tiered by seniority, Barker explains. This includes a creative-technology apprenticeship for entry-level staff, generative-AI fundamentals for mid-level staff, and an AI and business “diploma” for executives.
“If everyone is learning the same tools through the same platform, agencies that previously had nothing in common suddenly acquire a shared knowledge,” Barker says. So far, 12,000 employees have accessed the training, collectively completing 120,000 hours of learning.
Getting a nervous workforce to see AI as an opportunity, rather than a threat to their jobs, is still a challenge, Barker admits. What’s helped, she says, is focusing on quick wins and hands-on practice rather than top-down pressure. “When the conversation around AI started, you could really feel the fear in people,” she says. “What changed was letting people play with the tools. Employees found they sparked ideas rather than replaced them.”
Transformation fatigue
Barker acknowledges that the multiple changes and restructures can take their toll on staff and admits that improving culture across the newly consolidated business is a “tough” task.
Part of Barker’s job is convincing WPP employees that this time is different, she says. In practice, that means more regular communication and clearer explanations for why the restructure is necessary. Rose now sends the global workforce monthly video updates and is pushing the rest of the leadership team to follow suit.
Barker explains: “People are being told why changes are happening rather than just experiencing them, leadership is unified in delivering that message, and, unlike before, when one agency would restructure in isolation, this time the whole company is transforming together.”
Going forward, Barker wants culture to be something WPP can measure, not just describe. “For the first time, we’re being really intentional about what our culture is,” she says. “It’s not just going to be words on a page. It’s going to be measured, and we’re going to hold our leaders accountable for it.”
To do that, she is running regular employee surveys and tying the results directly to client satisfaction data, testing the idea that happier employees lead to happier clients. Barker hopes this will turn culture from a soft concept into a metric leadership can be judged on. “We’re using culture as a growth lever,” she says.
Getting 90,000 people to ‘unlearn’
The biggest challenge Barker faces is building a new culture out of a company that, for decades, ran as a loose federation of agencies, each with its own identity. “For years, WPP was the parent company you went to for approvals,” Barker says, not necessarily somewhere employees felt had a strong culture of its own.
Barker spent 13 years at Ogilvy, a WPP subsidiary, and says 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,” she says. “We’re trying to build a new WPP culture.”
Her plan starts with one shared set of values, which will replace the values each agency previously set themselves, and leaders will be judged on whether they live up to them.
Employees will also be offered broader opportunities for career development, allowing people to switch between disciplines. “We’re building new opportunities for people internally to try different career paths and be more rounded,” Barker says.
On skills, Barker says the priority is training managers to run teams well, building AI fluency, and getting client-facing staff to advise clients rather than just execute their briefs. She says WPP needs to make that shift fast, given how quickly the industry is changing.
Whether it is enough to turn culture into a genuine growth lever at a company that recently lost its place on the FTSE 100 remains questionable. While the restructure has the potential to bring WPP £500 million in savings, restoring its culture may represent the bigger challenge.