- Denmark and Finland's business leaders prioritize a culture of trusting employees more often than bosses in the United States. It pays off.
Countries with good quality of life and work-life balance share a common, albeit unsurprising, theme: bosses that trust their employees. While giving employees latitude might not be all that natural to micro-managers, they might need to practice new habits as countries with the happiest employees share this value.
Denmark, a country that continually lands among the top the list of places with the best quality of life and work-life balance stands apart from the United States in its treatment of workers.
"No one is trying to micromanage you, or look over your shoulder," Gabriel Hoces, a Copenhagen-based employee of a tech firm tells BBC’s David Silverberg, emphasizing the importance of trust throughout the course of the interview. "Bosses aren't coming in to check if you put in eight or nine hours a day, as they mainly only care if you completed your projects.”
Meanwhile, a culture of tracking employees has slowly swept the American workforce. As remote and hybrid work surged during the pandemic, some top companies took to using software to track productivity and even silently count employees' keystrokes.
“We’re in this era of measurement but we don’t know what we should be measuring,” Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft, told The New York Times in an 2022 expose of how companies like JPMorgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group, tracked employees. During the same time job dissatisfaction was at an all-time high, according to Gallup’s pulse check.
More recently, traditionalist companies have curbed flexible policies and called staff back into the office. Monitoring persists, as some employers track badge data to assess how often people are adhering to the new office mandates. This strategy, unsurprisingly, tends to backfire. Almost half of workers would take a pay cut if it meant not having their online activity tracked by their employer, according to a Checkr survey of more than 3,000 people..
"There's a lot of trust in Denmark in that way,” adds Hoces, speaking of the lack of monitoring. “I don't feel a hierarchy at my job. It's all very democratic.” Denmark is known for its relatively high trust in its system, as 44% of Danes reported high or moderately high trust in the government to OECD. That’s compared to the national average of 39%. Meanwhile, in the U.S. trust in institutions, especially the government, has dwindled for decades.
Trust is “conducive to a better business environment,” Denmark notes in its official website, adding that it’s “also an important part of doing business in Denmark.” Of course, it’s not just about trust. The country’s extensive paid leave and family leave for parents helps, according to the BBC.
Finland, which has been listed the happiest country by the World Happiness Report for six years in a row, also has a culture of trust at work. “Finland is a high-trust society, and Finns trust their institutions and their fellow citizens,” writes Anni Hallila, head of people and culture at Framery, for Fortune. “That same trust extends to the workplace and is visible in how employees trust their leaders and their colleagues,” she says, warning companies not to spy and noting that Framery has low turnover as “trust drives results.”
