Switzerland’s financial center is eager to avoid the embarrassing missteps of the City and Wall Street in corralling bankers back to office work. finews.com looks at how.
The Swiss government gave the all-clear to return to work three months ago – and yet most Swiss bankers are still ensconced at home, working remotely. UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti is vocal about getting people back – but no one is prepared to push.
There have been exceptions: one Swiss bank months ago moved some traders to an undisclosed outside location maintained for emergencies like fire or flooding. And some key executives have quietly been at Paradeplatz offices throughout the crisis.
Private bankers, who are eager to get back to an office routine and especially shmoozing in person, are unsurprisingly also at the forefront. Many small wealth managers have quietly gone back to normal office hours, interspersed with the occasional day working from home, a Swiss expert said.
UBS, Blackrock Not Fans
But what of the thousands of rank-and-file who are still largely working from home? Ermotti, whose last day at UBS is in five weeks, emphasized it is «not sustainable» for banks to have the overwhelming majority of staff at home. He isn’t alone: Blackrock boss Larry Fink doesn’t think too much remote working is culturally healthy either.
Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan both learned the perils of summoning bankers back: both banks scrambled to respond when an employee turned up infected. Raiffeisen, a Swiss cooperative lender, tightened restrictions for its staff at the beginning of this month, as Switzerland’s infection rate ticked higher.
In-Person Wooing
Instead of ordering people back, UBS and Credit Suisse are looking to the typical Swiss method to avoid that situation: seeking a consensus. Credit Suisse is running a six-month «new way of work» pilot, under which more than 1,000 staff in Switzerland volunteer to test various work models.
A group of the Swiss bank’s «critical» staff has been back, in alternating groups, for several months now. Credit Suisse is still working on a solution for its roughly 16,000 Swiss staff.
UBS, which stepped up the last leg of a remote working program for most employees just as the outbreak was declared a pandemic, is also surveying staff as well as providing managers with support on how to lead teams from home.
Flexible Vs Aggressive
Swiss Re, where just a fraction of staff in July wanted to return to newly-refurbished lakeside offices, appears resigned to flexible working arrangements for the foreseeable future: a spokeswoman said the reinsurer has no plans to order staff back and is affording workers freedom to decide from where they work.
The quiet, consensus-based return contrasts with bolder views abroad. Schroders last month committed to a flexible working permanently, while PwC was far more aggressive. The auditing firm was forced to send roughly 9,000 U.K. staff back home again after a spike in corona infections in the U.K.
