Our workforce

Global reach, local expertise.

With more than 74,000 employees working in 48 countries and representing 150 nationalities, we have the global presence, experience and range of business activities to have real impact on a global scale.

This infographic shows that we have 74,022 employees by headcount. 41% of our workforce is female, and 59% is male. 19% are under age 30, 59% are age 30-50 and 22% are over age 50. Our workforce is located 28% in Switzerland, 30% in the Americas, 22% in Asia Pacific and 20% in EMEA. Our employees come from 48 countries and 150 nationalities, they speak 151 languages and have 8 years of service, on average. All data was calculated as of 31 December 2022 on a headcount basis of 74,022 internal employees only (72,597 FTE).

Want to know more?

Our 2022 Sustainability Report discusses workforce composition, people management priorities and relevant processes in detail, and the appendix contains additional workforce data. Have a look at the “What we do for our employees” chapter and “Workforce by the numbers” in Appendix 4.

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Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I)

Our clients come from around the world, and we’ve found that teams with a wide range of skills, experiences and backgrounds better understand (and relate to) our equally diverse clients’ needs. An inclusive workplace also makes UBS a better place to work – just one reason we’re building a culture of belonging throughout the firm.

We take a broad approach to DE&I. Our strategy and initiatives focus on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnic diversity, disabilities, age, and veteran status, from recruitment through to retirement, along the entire employee lifecycle. Within that, increasing the representation of women and ethnic minorities, especially in leadership roles, is a near-term priority. Currently, 42% of our Group Executive Board (GEB) members are female, as are 29.4% of senior managers who report directly to a GEB member. We’re also seeing growth in our representation of ethnic minorities, especially in the UK and the US. Key initiatives include partnerships with the Investments and Wealth Institute and Kaplan Financial Education in the US to provide scholarships for diverse advisors (and other specialists) to pursue various industry certifications, and our global UBS Career Comeback program, which helps us hire and retain more female leaders and subject experts. To date, 213 women and 21 men have relaunched their careers with us after a break.

This infographic describes our gender and ethnic minority representation aspirations. We want to have 30% women in Director and above roles, and 26% US and UK ethnic minorities in Director and above roles by 2025. At the end of 2022, we had 27.8% women at Director level and above, along with 23.0% UK and 20.4% US ethnic minorities at Director level and above.

Ensuring employees have a voice

Our employees want to be heard and have an impact – within the firm, and in society – and to be actively engaged in shaping our identity, direction and daily work life. That’s why we regularly seek their views on employee engagement, work environment, collaboration, career development, line manager effectiveness, employee well-being and more. We use that feedback to continuously improve our culture and our people-management processes, and to focus on topics that matter to employees.

This infographic highlights some employee survey results. 73% of employees participated in 2022. Among respondents, 92% understand our purpose, 86% feel comfortable being themselves at work, and 73% of employees believe we’re living up to our purpose. At the same time, 88% agree that the firm conducts business responsibly, 85% feel able to speak up and raise concerns and 78% agree their line manager is effective.

Fast fact

“We have employees around the world – the largest percentage (30%) is in the Americas, 28% in Switzerland, 22% in Asia Pacific and 20% in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Last year, 1,704 employees moved to a role in a different business division and 570 employees changed regions.”

Unlocking potential

We invest in our employees’ development and seek to help them grow their skills and their careers. A key part of our talent management strategy is to offer career opportunities, not just jobs, because:

  • employees with forward-looking, agile mindsets drive better client service and satisfaction
  • internal role changes help people build skills and relationships across teams, locations and businesses

In particular, we actively support internal mobility opportunities for all employees and work to create a talent pipeline that stretches from graduate and international mobility programs for early career talent to targeted development for mid-level and senior leaders. In the process, we’ve become known as a great place to build a career. Check out our awards sites to see how we measure up in business, and as an employer.

Focusing on impact and outcome

We value our high-performance culture and have recently updated our performance management approach to better ensure that we can appropriately assess and reward all of our employees. Introduced in 2021, MyImpact still considers an employee’s contribution and behavior, but now it focuses even more on their impact and outcome. We also introduced an integrated feedback tool in 2022 that makes it easy for employees to give and receive feedback to colleagues throughout the year. It turned out to be a big hit – more than 180,000 instances of feedback were given during the year.

At UBS, our pay practices are designed to ensure that we appropriately reward employees for their contribution, and we regularly conduct internal reviews and external audits as quality checks. Since 2020, we have been certified under EQUAL-SALARY Foundation standards for our HR practices in Switzerland, the US, the UK, the Hong Kong SAR and Singapore, covering more than two-thirds of our global employee population. Our global HR policies and standards – including reward, performance management and promotion – are reviewed annually. Our processes are also global, and we take the same review approach and have the same standard of excellence across all of our locations. See the 2022 Compensation Report(PDF, 2 MB) for more information.