Danish company does away with bosses to boost performance

Danish company Clever has done away with bosses to foster creativity and boost group performance.

COPENHAGEN – Danish company Clever is trying something it believes is clever indeed: it has done away with bosses to foster creativity and boost group performance.

At its Copenhagen headquarters in a former industrial district, Denmark’s leading operator of electric car charging stations has no hierarchical organisation structures.

Instead, the company has self-managed groups, where each employee is part of the decision-making process and in charge of following through.

Casper Kirketerp-Moller co-founded the company in 2012 with just a few employees.

Denmark and the other Nordic countries have long championed egalitarian social models and flat business hierarchies.

But Kirketerp-Moller wanted to take things a step further, thinking “we could do it better than the traditional way”, he told AFP.

“I was very much into how we humans are together, what (business) culture do we need,” he explained.

Clever grew over the years, and in 2019 Kirketorp-Moller began gradually changing the company’s business model to get rid of middle management and even his own role as chief executive officer.

For him, the most important thing was to unlock each employee’s potential – especially important in the age of artificial intelligence.

“In the new era where AI will do everything around efficiency, it’s the human skills, it’s the human business that will be essential for companies to thrive and innovate in the future,” he said.

Clever’s reorganisation was motivated by a desire to be able to act quickly on decisions without getting bogged down in laborious approval procedures from higher-ups, in addition to empowering employees.

“Many organisations are fighting with a high degree of complexity. And that makes decisions very difficult in a very hierarchical, bureaucratic organisation because all decisions involve many different managers,” explained Roskilde University professor Helge Hvid, an expert on self-managed companies.

Flat hierarchies are popular with employees, especially younger ones.

“People want to have a say in their work, and they want to have meaning in their work. They want to have autonomy,” noted Hvid.

“We assign and recruit people saying we expect that you really take responsibility for your role, yourself and the team,” Kirketerp-Moller said. “Freedom and responsibility have to be correlated.”

Danish company Clever’s CEO Casper Kirketerp-Moller co-founded the company in 2012 with just a few employees.

Kirketorp-Moller and his co-founders have ju