The percentage of foreign executives working at Switzerland’s largest companies has reached an historic high this year, according to a new report.
And as a result the proportion of Swiss executives at the country’s top firms has reached an historic low, according to the report published by the recruitment firm Guido Schilling.
Only 51 percent of executives of Switzerland’s 100 largest firms are Swiss, and only 27 percent of executives of publicly listed companies on the Swiss Market Index (SMI) are Swiss.
Some argue that attracting talent from around the world gives Swiss businesses a competitive edge. But some in the Swiss business community see this shift as an issue to correct, according to Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger.
“Alongside Great Britain, Switzerland has the most international business elite,” sociologist Felix Bühlmann from the University of Lausanne told Tages-Anzeiger.
But this wasn’t always the case. In 1980, just 4 percent of executives working in Switzerland were foreign-born, says Stéphanie Ginalski, a historian at the University of Lausanne.
Up until the 1990s, Ginalski told Tages-Anzeiger, a typical business leader in Switzerland was “a man with a Swiss passport from an upper-middle-class family, usually an officer in the army.”
These business leaders were typically deeply involved in Swiss networks of power and influence, she said.
In the decades since, boardrooms around the world have globalized, and this trend has been particularly evident in Switzerland. This explosion of foreign talent in top roles is attributed, in part, to the attractive wages Swiss companies offer.
In Switzerland, most foreign executives and board members come from Germany, the United States, the UK and France. Hiring German and French candidates makes particular sense in Switzerland, given the national languages.
Economist Tomas Casas i Klett told the newspaper that an executive’s nationality was less important than his or her commitment to the Swiss “way of doing business,” which he said was based on free competition and technological innovation.
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But some are worried that the growing number of foreign-born executives in Switzerland means businesses will be less aligned with Swiss values.
Bjørn Johansson, a leading headhunter in Switzerland, told Tages-Anzeiger that an overrepresentation of non-Swiss executives in Switzerland can be “problematic” because it may undermine the shared trust and values upon which he believes the Swiss business landscape is built.
And even as some companies specifically seek Swiss talent to fill their boardrooms, a major problem remains, Johansson said.
“The demand for Swiss executives far exceeds supply,” he said.
Due to the fact Swiss companies are disproportionately large compared to the country’s population, Johansson said finding enough qualified Swiss candidates to fill these roles can be a challenge.
