Working at UBS

For most of our employees, both are possible. What started as a temporary necessity during the pandemic has become a core part of our workplace culture, and a competitive advantage. We’ve long supported flexible working whenever possible, and we implemented hybrid working protocols firm-wide in 2022. As a result, considering various role and regulatory restrictions, around 93% of our employees are eligible to work at home several days a week. We’re also rolling out a virtual worker framework in the US that will allow eligible employees to work completely remote. Options like this, along with flexible locations, flexible hours, part-time working, job-sharing and partial retirement, help us attract and retain a larger and more diverse group of employees, including early-career talent, working parents and those in continuing education. They also put increased emphasis on technology and virtual collaboration, sparking the kind of innovative thinking that makes us more agile and helps us further improve clients’ – and colleagues’ – experiences.

Our clients’ needs are always evolving. That’s just one reason we continue to advance new ways of working across the firm. In particular, we’ve accelerated our agile transformation over the past year, as we’ve learned that pods of specialists with end-to-end responsibility can achieve better results, more quickly, on virtually any project, product or process within the firm.

So far, around 18,500 of us are working in agile teams, with more employees expected to adopt agile working practices or join agile teams in 2023. Along the way, we’ve leveraged a specialized knowledge-sharing community and rolled out bespoke training through our in-house UBS University to help employees in all our businesses get up to speed. 

We care about our employees, and we want to support them. We also know that healthy people who are comfortable being themselves at work perform better individually and are more engaged in their team’s success, both of which lead to more impactful outcomes. Spanning social, physical, mental and financial well-being, our comprehensive health and well-being offering includes a wide range of programs, benefits, eLearning and workplace resources. All are designed to help all our employees manage their health, foster well-being, support resilience and promote the sustainability of the organization.

To promote physical and mental health, we sponsor firm-wide initiatives like virtual fitness challenges and provide mental health support that includes an employee assistance program and free access to a specialized mindfulness app. We also sponsor financial education events in every region and help employees positively impact their communities and society at large by matching charitable donations and offering paid leave to volunteer in community, environmental and community initiatives.

A big part of being a great place to work is providing access to competitive benefits. Ours – which include retirement benefits, health care, and insurance against risks like disability and personal leave – are custom-designed to meet the needs of our local employee base. Even more, they often go beyond what’s legally required in that market. For example, employees in many locations can access company-provided or subsidized health services, childcare and fitness options.

We offer our employees generous paid parental leave, and beyond that, paid family-care leave in many locations globally to help employees take care of their loved ones throughout their career. We are also committed to enabling new mothers to continue to breastfeed and/or pump and store breastmilk after returning to work. Our offices in the US, the UK, Switzerland and Poland, along with most locations in EMEA and APAC, have dedicated facilities, and new mothers in any location can use working time for this. In the US, UBS contributes to employees’ dependent care flexible spending accounts and employees with caregiving responsibility for young children are also eligible for back-up care, including in-home care options. Employees in the UK are offered back-up childcare options. In Switzerland, UBS is a member of two associations that advise on childcare and help employees find access to regular and emergency childcare.

We actively support hybrid working options (a mix of home and in-office working) along with flexible working arrangements (e.g., part-time, job-sharing and partial-retirement roles). We also sponsor comprehensive employee assistance programs in all locations to help manage issues like stress, illness, personal conflict, finances, bereavement, mental health and elder care.

See the UBS Sustainability Report 2022 (PDF, 9 MB) for more information about our workplace and benefits like parental leave, and UBS Careers for more about life at UBS.