In the Danish company managing the largest network of electric vehicle chargers in the country, the director eliminated his own position, and now more than 500 employees jointly manage the business.
The leading Danish operator of electric vehicle charging stations, Clever, has completely abandoned traditional management hierarchy. There are no bosses, no middle managers, and, starting in 2025, even no positions with the word "manager" in the title.
From its headquarters in a repurposed industrial area of Copenhagen, the company operates on the principle of self-managing teams, where every employee participates in decision-making and is responsible for implementation.
The author of this experiment is co-founder Kasper Kirketerp-Møller, who launched the business over ten years ago with a handful of employees.
Denmark and its northern neighbors have long prided themselves on egalitarian work cultures and flat structures, but Kirketerp-Møller decided to go even further.
"We could do this better than the traditional way," he told AFP, explaining his long-standing fascination with "how we, as humans, interact with each other" and what kind of corporate culture the company actually requires.
Starting in 2019, Kirketerp-Møller gradually removed management levels, ultimately eliminating his own position as CEO. The main goal was to unlock the full potential of each person in the workforce, which he considers increasingly important in an automated world.
"In a new era, when AI will take over everything related to efficiency, it is human skills, the human dimension of business that will be key for companies to grow and innovate in the future," he noted.
There was also a purely practical motivation. According to Kirketerp-Møller, deeply hierarchical organizations struggle to act quickly, as every decision must go through a long chain of approvals.
Helge Hvid, a professor at Roskilde University studying self-managing companies, agrees that bureaucracy can paralyze decision-making when too many executives need to sign off, and that flat models are particularly appealing to young workers.
"People want to have a voice in what they do and want to see meaning in their work. They want autonomy," Hvid told AFP.
Freedom Within Set Frameworks
The abolition of bosses does not mean a rejection of structure.
About 500 employees at Clever are divided into more than 50 teams of eight to twelve people, each focused on specific goals; roles are clearly defined, including for tasks such as recruitment and personnel management.
Kirketerp-Møller candidly speaks about the risks of excessive radicalism, warning that if the entire structure is removed at once, the company will inevitably be overwhelmed by chaos. This tension is well known to organization theorists.
Anne-Sophie Dubé from the French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts notes that while flattening the company's structure is intended to combat bureaucracy, a certain amount of written rules paradoxically remains useful for everyone to understand the rules of the game.
For the staff, the appeal of such a system is quite tangible.
Lykke Jeppesen, who has been helping colleagues come to joint decisions for over four years, particularly values the absence of competition.
"I work in a team where we are equals [...]. We are here to succeed together, so there is no internal competition among us," the 37-year-old Jeppesen told AFP.
According to her, this model meets basic human needs for autonomy, freedom, and a sense of belonging.
An internal audit in 2024 showed that 92% of Clever employees happily go to work every morning.
Earlier this month, Kirketerp-Møller finally left the company; however, the Danish energy distributor Andel, which has owned Clever since 2018, promised not to disturb the unconventional management structure, suggesting that the "company without bosses" experiment will survive those who initiated it.
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