Agency giants outline return plans
Publicis Groupe Chairman-CEO Arthur Sadoun yesterday detailed the holding company’s plans for returning to the office in a video memo. In it, he assured employees that no one is expected to return until a vaccine is found and even then “remote work will be an integrated part of our daily culture,” Ad Age’s Lindsay Rittenhouse reports.
“What is certain is that Publicis will not be a Zoom company. Nor will Publicis be a 100% in-office company,” he said in the video. Once there is a vaccine, “and not before,” the office will be the “primary” place of work, Sadoun said.
WPP will take a similar hybrid approach. The holding company had seen about 20% of its staffers in the U.K. return to the office before new lockdown measures were issued and its been slow getting U.S. employees back, CEO Mark Read said during an interview on Ad Age Remotely this week. While Read has been “keen” to get people to return to the office, he doesn’t expect employees to be there all the time.
“We’re never going to go back to the way we were before COVID, and it looks like by the time we get through this we will have forgotten what life was like before COVID,” Read said. Moving forward, “there’s going to need to be a reason to come into work,” he said, regarding to the future of office space. Only 2% of WPP employees want to be back in the office five days a week, Read said, referencing an internal survey. The most popular choice was three days a week in the office, while a “fair number” didn’t want to come back to the office at all. Watch the full interview here.