Why Is WPP Forcing Firms To Bring Employees Back To The Office?

(MENAFN- PRovoke) This is not an article about whether WPP should order its 110,000 employees to return to the office at least four days a week-though my views of that may be apparent to a discerning reader. This is instead an article about whether WPP should order the CEOs of its various advertising, digital and of course public relations agencies to force their employees back to the office.

On the former question, there is clearly plenty of room for a robust and healthy debate. WPP has apparently found that higher levels of office attendance are associated with stronger“employee engagement, improved client survey scores and better financial performance,” according to chief executive Mark Read, making the policy announcement last week.

Lots of companies have apparently arrived at the same conclusion , although the empirical evidence tends to suggest that the opposite is true.

A study by
Stanford of 16,000 workers
found that working from home increased productivity by
13%, attributed to a quieter more convenient working environment and working more minutes per shift because of fewer breaks and sick days. In the same study, workers also reported improved work satisfaction, and attrition rates were cut by 50% (women in particular were more likely to report increased satisfaction).

Another
survey by ConnectSolution s found that the majority
of those who
work remotely
at least a few times a month increased their productivity, with
30%
doing more work in less time and
24%
doing more work in the same period of time.

As for cultural issues-the concern we hear most often from public relations firms-there is no doubt that maintaining a collaborative culture when many employees choose to work from home presents a different challenge but, as this Harvard Business Review article shows, smart managers at a wide range of companies have found ways to maintain culture in a hybrid world.

But if researchers have found that many companies benefit from generous work-from-home policies, why are so many companies demanding that their employees spend more time back in the office?

The answer is totally unsurprising: a Microsoft study found that 85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has“made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” (Note the wording: the challenge is not actual productivity; it's confidence.) The same study found almost half (49%) of managers“struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.”

In other words, the largest issue with remote working or hybrid working is the insecurity of managers.

But even if we accept that the impact of work-from-home may vary from company to company, office to office, and even employee to employee (many PR firms, for example, report that younger workers want face-time in the office, while others fear they mat not receive the same advancement opportunities working from home), the data finds that work-from-home is better for certain groups of employees: high-performing employees perform even better when given flexibility; and women are penalized disproportionately by a forced return to the office.

It's worth noting that women also make up a large part of the public relations industry workforce. It would be nice to think that high-performing, self-motivated workers are also over-represented.

Which brings me to the promised point. This seems like an issue that should be left to WPP's individual agencies, or even the individual markets and offices served by those agencies, rather than to a holding company.

In an ideal world, it seems to me, the holding company would set performance targets based on outcomes rather than mandated processes. It would then give the leaders of its component agencies-who are pretty much all called“chief executive officers,” a title that suggests both responsibility and authority-the freedom to decide how those targets can best be met.

If there are agencies within the WPP network whose employees are unusually unproductive in the work-from-home environment, then the CEOs of those agencies should be free to call those employees back into the workplace. But if there are agencies with lots of high-performing people-and surely there must be some-they should be free to take advantage of the many benefits of a more flexible workplace.

What's the point of having a title like president or CEO if you don't get to make this kind of decision for yourself or your employees?

The petition calling upon Read to reconsider his back-to-the-office mandate has reportedly reached 10,000 names . It's hard to imagine that the back-to-the-office mandate won't have some negative impact on retention (not to mention recruitment). If it does, the data suggest that high-performing employees will be those most affected.

It's possible, of course, that Read has thought this through and the likely departure of top talent is seen as a feature rather than a bug. Reducing overhead has been a priority for holding companies in recent years. But at a time when the big budgets and the big margins in PR go to firms that can provide senior business counsel on critical issues, it's hard to see how public relations agencies will benefit.

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