WPP’s sweeping restructure under chief executive Cindy Rose is targeting £500 million in savings by 2028 through a plan known as Elevate28.
Rose replaced Mark Read as CEO in October last year, inheriting a business that had issued a fresh profit warning following a sharp decline in revenues.
WPP had lost major clients including Coca-Cola’s North American business and Mars’ snacking and pet care accounts before Rose took the helm.
The company fell out of the FTSE 100 just two months after Rose’s appointment, ending a near 30-year run on the blue-chip index.
Elevate28 replaces WPP’s holding-company structure with a single business divided into four units: creative, media, production, and enterprise solutions.
The restructure is estimated to cost £400 million, with further job cuts expected before the end of the year, adding to a headcount reduction from 108,044 in 2024 to 98,655 at the end of 2025.
WPP split its top HR role into two positions to support the transformation, with Mark Taylor joining from the Lego Group in April as global chief people officer.
Marie-Claire Barker moved into a newly created role of chief people officer for performance and culture, tasked with embedding the restructure across the business.
“Taylor’s remit is very much about what this transformation looks like structurally,” Barker tells Fortune. “Mine’s enabling it to happen.”
Barker adds that “the way people work and the way our leaders show up will be what determines whether the restructure succeeds.”
One of Barker’s most pressing challenges is managing fallout from WPP’s return-to-office mandate, which requires staff to attend at least four days a week.
A petition from “concerned WPP employees” demanding the policy be scrapped gathered more than 20,000 signatures, with complaints about commutes and impacts on disabled and neurodivergent staff.
Barker says the policy is staying but that the reasoning has shifted, noting: “There wasn’t a reason to bring staff in, it was more of a mandate.”
“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,” she says.
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 according to real estate firm JLL.
Barker is tracking employee sentiment data and says people with daily office attendance score higher on satisfaction and engagement measures.
“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.
Increasing AI adoption across the business represents another cultural challenge, with all training delivered through WPP’s existing WPP Open platform.
Courses are tiered by seniority, ranging from a creative-technology apprenticeship for entry-level staff to an AI and business diploma for executives.
So far, 12,000 employees have accessed the training, collectively completing 120,000 hours of learning across the platform.
“When the conversation around AI started, you could really feel the fear in people,” Barker says, adding that letting employees experiment with tools helped shift that mood.
Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report found that executives and HR leaders are misaligned on AI priorities, a gap the report warns could slow transformation.
Further job cuts tied to the restructure will primarily affect HR and finance functions as back-office operations are streamlined and automated through AI tools.
Rose now sends the global workforce monthly video updates, pushing the rest of the leadership team to follow with more regular communication.
Barker explains: “People are being told why changes are happening rather than just experiencing them, leadership is unified in delivering that message.”
She also notes that unlike previous rounds of change, “this time the whole company is transforming together” rather than agency by agency.
Barker spent 13 years at WPP subsidiary Ogilvy and says the hardest part of the reset is dissolving deeply entrenched agency silos across the group.
“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.
A new shared set of values will replace the individual values each WPP agency previously set for themselves, with leaders held accountable for living up to them.
“We’re using culture as a growth lever,” Barker says, tying employee survey results directly to client satisfaction data to make culture measurable and manageable.