Week Six: An Interesting Turn of Events

This past week was definitely the most interesting so far. I showed up to work on Monday like any other day, said hi to my colleagues and resumed working on a tedious excel project assigned to me the week before. After a couple of hours working on it, I looked up to see that the vibe of the room had completely changed. People on the desk across from me were standing around anxiously whispering and some were even pacing. I didn’t want to ask what was going on because I felt like it wasn’t my place, so I continued to work on my project. At lunch, a fellow intern pulled me over and informed me that people were getting laid off all over the firm and that two people on my team had already been asked to leave. I was completely shocked, but I finally understood why everyone was being so weird. No one knew who would be laid off next so everyone was on edge. After lunch I had a meeting and then returned to my desk where the two younger colleagues pulled me and the other intern from our team into a seperate room to tell us that three people on our team had been laid off, including my supervisor Andrew, the head of Wealth Planning Sales team. I couldn’t believe it! The guy I was interning for and working on a lot of projects for was simply gone, with no warning or goodbye. I selfishly wondered what this would mean for me and if this would affect my internship. Especially with two weeks left, I had developed a relationship with Andrew and was working on a bunch of different things for him, and now I had no idea what would happen.

At the very end of the day Bonnie, the head of the Financial Planning Team, pulled the same four people into the same separate room to re-inform us what happened and to tell us that she was now going to be heading both the Financial Planning team and the Wealth Planning Sales team and that I was now her intern. She wanted to comfort us and tell us that this shouldn’t change our view on UBS and that things like this happen, but everything will be fine for the remainder of the summer. When I gathered more information about the layoffs throughout the week, I learned that the firm was trying to cut costs and meet some numbers and it wasn’t necessarily performance based. This past week was definitely a reality check from my happy-go-lucky internship where everything is fine and I am learning a lot and enjoying the company, but made me realize that things like this happen and people can lose their job on any given day, just because. The remainder of the week was damage control, everyone was rushing around trying to fill in the gaps from where those people had previously filled, so I wasn’t able to work on many of my own projects, but instead did a bunch of odd jobs like fill in on the phones.

Although I understand that job layoffs happen, I was surprised to actually see it take place. I wonder if it would have been better to wait a short two weeks to do it so that the large number of interns wouldn’t be put off or affected by the re-organization. It’s definitely altered my opinion about UBS and how they went about handling the situation, especially since all summer I have been told how much the people matter to UBS and its culture, but then they go and lay off a ton of people just because they need to meet a number quota. I’m not alone either, all of my colleagues have been very forthcoming about their feelings on the matter as it certainly caught everyone off guard… Definitely not good for office morale and work productivity, especially when you layoff people that everyone really liked and respected. Again, I see why as an organization they need to do things like this and I suppose there really is never a good time for it, but it was such a weird week and put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth about working in an industry that is so unpredictable and seemingly little job security.