Danish company does away with bosses to boost 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.

Clever did away with manager titles entirely in 2025.

“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.”

Kirketorp-Moller and his co-founders have just sold Clever to Danish energy distribution company Andel, which has insisted that Clever’s organisational structure will remain as is.

Structure still key

Clever employs around 500 people, divided into more than 50 teams of eight to 12, organised by objectives.

Roles are defined within each group, particularly for recruitment and human resources.

“One of the major motivations for freeing up organisations is to fight bureaucracy, but paradoxically a certain amount of codification remains useful in order to spell out the rules of the game clearly for everyone,” said Anne-Sophie Dubey, a specialist in organisational theory at France’s Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris.

“You cannot just release freedom and remove structures, because then you enter into chaos,” noted Kirketerp-Moller.

Clever employee Lykke Jeppesen is a fan of the model.

“I work in a team where we’re equal... We’re here to succeed together, so there’s no internal competition with each other,” said the 37-year-old woman, who has spent the past four-and-a-half years helping teams with joint decision-making.

According to an internal audit in 2024, 92 per cent of Clever’s employees were happy to go to work each morning.

Jeppesen said the model “attends to some very basic human needs, such as the feeling of autonomy and freedom”.

In addition, “it satisfies that need for relatedness”.

In Denmark, the co-management model, while still marginal, can be found in different kinds of organisations, from the municipal subsidiary of the state employment agency to a children’s rights association.

But day-to-day work is not without its hitches, and demands constant attention.

“There are stress factors in self-managing organisations. Conflicts could be one. Too many obligations could be another one. Uncertainty could also be a cause for stress,” said Helge Hvid. AFP