Six months ago, most leaders were still calling hybrid work the settled question. It isn’t.

WPP now expects four office days a week including two Fridays a month. Barclays has moved 85,000 staff from two office days to three. John Lewis & Partners has mandated three days for buying and merchandising teams. JD Sports Fashion UK head office staff have been back four days since last year.

None of this is being sold as a productivity fix. It’s being sold as culture, coaching, and collaboration. Worth asking why the sudden urgency, several years after the pandemic supposedly settled this.

Big Shift: The office is back as a control mechanism

For a while, remote and hybrid work were treated as a talent retention tool. Now they’re being treated as a risk to manage. The shift in language is the tell. Barclays talks about “balancing flexibility… with the importance of working together.” WPP‘s memo leaned on collaboration and creative culture.

What’s actually changed is confidence. When hiring was tight and attrition was expensive, flexibility was a lever companies pulled to keep people. Now, with several sectors seeing looser labour markets, that lever matters less. The return to work (RTO) wave isn’t a discovery that offices work better. It’s a signal that the balance of power has shifted back toward the employer, and offices are the most visible way to demonstrate that.

For hiring and org design, this matters more than the policy itself. A company’s stance on where work happens is now a genuine differentiator in the market for talent, not a footnote in the offer letter. Candidates are reading these announcements as signals about trust, not just logistics.

📌 Takeaway: Watch what a return-to-office mandate says about confidence in the labour market, not just about where people sit.

Brand in Focus: WPP

WPP announced its four-day office policy back in January, effective from April. Staff pushed back hard: a petition calling for the CEO to reverse the mandate picked up more than 18,000 signatures. Employees in London reported the offices simply weren’t built for the volume. Not enough screens to connect laptops. Missing cables. No spare desks. Patchy wifi. Morale, by most accounts, dropped rather than lifted.

The irony is hard to miss for a company that sells culture and creative collaboration as its product. WPP is one of the world’s largest marketing services groups, built on the pitch that bringing people together produces better creative work. When the internal reality of “coming together” turns out to be a scramble for a free desk, the policy undercuts the exact brand story it’s meant to reinforce.

📌 Takeaway: If your product is culture and collaboration, your own office experience becomes part of the pitch, whether you plan for that or not.

Consulting Corner: The mid-market squeeze

Away from the office wars, consulting itself is being reshaped by the same underlying force: AI capability changing who needs how many people. AI-native boutiques can now run research, modelling, and analysis that used to require a bench of junior analysts, letting small teams take on scopes that once needed a much bigger team. At the other end, the largest firms are scaling through acquisition and platform investment to keep pace.

Caught in the middle are mid-sized firms with neither the balance sheet to compete for enterprise transformation work nor the lean cost base to match boutique pricing. Several analysts now expect that segment to shrink meaningfully over the next few years, leaving an industry split between global scale players and specialist boutiques.

The talent consequence is worth noting. If junior analyst work is increasingly automated and mid-market firms (traditionally a training ground for that talent) are shrinking, the traditional consulting career ladder starts to look shorter and steeper at the bottom. Firms that figure out a new apprenticeship model, rather than just cutting junior headcount, will have a real hiring advantage in a few years.

📌 Takeaway: The consulting talent pipeline is being squeezed from both ends. Firms that solve for junior development now will be the ones with a bench later.

🔔 Final Thought

Two structural stories running in parallel this year: where work happens, and who gets to do the work at all as it gets automated. Both come back to the same question for leaders. Mandates are free. Career development isn’t. Most companies picked the free option this year.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own proximity play.