Danske Chairman Says Covid-19 Work Habits Can’t Be Prolonged

(Bloomberg) --

The chairman of Danske Bank A/S said it would be wrong to expect that work habits formed during the Covid-19 era will continue once the crisis is over.

“You must not just try to prolong this, because we can also see that people need to be working together with people,” Chairman Karsten Dybvad said in an interview in Copenhagen late on Tuesday.

Last week, Danske announced it would allow staff to work from home a couple of days a week, as a permanent adjustment to its employment terms. The bank said it made the decision after judging that the Covid-19 crisis, and the social distancing requirements it brought with it, “will have a lasting impact” on how people work.

Dybvad said it’s still not clear exactly how office work will change, given the lessons of the crisis.

“We have to analyze what kind of changes we can make,” he said. “Certainly, it has taught us something about efficiency.”

A Danish finance industry survey published in May found that 85% of firms were “very satisfied” or “partly satisfied” with the work done by staff during the lockdown triggered by Covid-19. Many respondents discovered that tasks requiring greater concentration were performed with fewer errors, while meetings were more efficient.

“There are certainly a lot of lessons in it,” Dybvad said. “At Danske, we have had 19,000 out of 22,000 people working from home, and not just working from home but working more intensively from home.”

Danske saw its impairments soar to 4.3 billion kroner ($655 million) in the first quarter due to the fallout of Covid-19. The Copenhagen-based lender, Denmark’s biggest, also faces penalties potentially in the billions of dollars after admitting that a large part of 200 billion euros ($227 billion) in transactions through an Estonian unit were suspicious.

Danske remains under investigation, and Dybvad said the bank is still devoting considerable resources to the case as it cooperates with the authorities.

“The work load related to it remains high because we have to settle all this, and when we have settled it, we can move on,” Dybvad said.

The bank will celebrate its 150th anniversary next year, and hopes to mark the occasion by resuming the dividend payments that were suspended amid regulatory pressure. Dybvad said it’s also time to start “earning more money.”

“It’s quite essential,” he said. “If you have a really good bank, you can do it.”

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