At the headquarters of the Danish hearing aid company Oticon, the chief executive's desk is just one in a row of desks in a wooden-floored open-plan office shared by perhaps 30 other workers.
There is no secretary or receptionist at the door to screen visitors. Any of the 270 people working
at the Copenhagen headquarters can talk at any time to the chief executive, or to anyone else.
Coffee bays with leaning bars have been installed on every floor to encourage workers to talk over coffee; the stairs (not lifts) between floors have been made wide enough to encourage people to linger and chat.
Most dramatically, a shredder has been installed on the top floor, sending shredded paper down a glass chute through the lower floors, to symbolise a culture of talking, not writing. "We have to talk to each other, not write memos to each other," says human resources manager Henrik Holck.
Oticon, the world's second-largest hearing aid manufacturer after Germany's Siemens, believes it gets a commercial advantage out of treating its workers as business partners, rather than the first costs to be cut in a downturn.
Ninety per cent of the workers have bought shares in the company at discounted prices. Although they are non-unionised, most earn more than the average industry pay on a performance-related basis, they get six weeks' holiday a year and their hours are flexible.
"You can come and go as you like. You can take the day off if you have worked a lot," Mr Holck says. There is a lie-down room in the office, and a room where a masseur regularly offers massage.
The result, Mr Holck says, is that Oticon can develop more new hearing aid products than its competitors, and take less time to get them to market. "If you can't develop new products very quickly for the market, then you are dead."
Oticon is one of two Danish companies in the world's top six hearing aid producers. Mr Holck says this is because hearing aids have been free in Denmark since 1951 - 60-65 per cent of all Danish people who could benefit from hearing aids have them, compared with 27 per cent in New Zealand. So Danish manufacturers have a huge home-base advantage in world markets.
And despite Denmark's high tax rate, he says, Oticon has a stable workforce and does not lose skilled people to other countries.
"Young people are very attracted by this way of working, they don't like the boss saying you have to be in at 8 am every day," he says. "They like to take the time themselves and come and go as they like."
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<i>Our turn:</i> A culture of inclusion
At the headquarters of the Danish hearing aid company Oticon, the chief executive's desk is just one in a row of desks in a wooden-floored open-plan office shared by perhaps 30 other workers.
There is no secretary or receptionist at the door to screen visitors. Any of the 270 people working
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