The impact of digitalisation on job quality and social dialogue in the public services – The case of Denmark DIGIQU@LPUB: Danish Country Report

The Danish public sector is among the most digitalised in the world, and Denmark therefore serves as a good case for assessing the impact of digitalisation on job quality and the work environment. This report addresses the relationship between digitalisation and job quality through a review of the relevant policies, the existing research literature, a European wide survey (DGQS) and through qualitative research conducted for this project. The qualitative data was collected in three specific sectors – the public administration, hospitals and electricity production and distribution – and emphasises the experiences of public sector workers. First ten interviews were conducted with sector-level (and a few national-level) worker representatives from the relevant unions. Next a focus group was conducted in each of the three sectors with workers, to probe their daily experiences of what digitalisation means for job quality and their daily work experience. While the focus groups emphasised the personal experiences of the workers, many of them are shop stewards and hence have a broader perspective on what their co-workers may experience. These data were supplemented by a cross-national European survey, which, however, did not get a very high response rate in Denmark. So, the results from the survey mainly supplement the qualitative data.
The results show that most of the changes and impact experienced by the workers do not relate directly to the technologies but rather to the organisation of work and the organisational handling and implementation of new technologies. Digitalisation of the Danish public sector is quite advanced, and the changes were perceived by the workers as comprehensive, but incremental. The workers in general have a positive attitude towards digitalisation, which in many cases is seen as improving workflows and labour processes as well as making the public sector more efficient. Nonetheless, they would strongly urge a more carefully designed implementation and more reflection on the purpose and advantages of different technologies. The workers in general reported that most policy-makers and top management still have an overly tech-optimistic perspective and tend to downplay the implementation challenges. Additionally, workers often feel that there is not enough time for implementing the technologies before new changes and technologies are introduced. This suggests that successful digitalisation requires a close collaboration between workers and management. Many workers in the study felt they have a good collaboration with the local level management, but that digitalisation processes were imposed on them top-down from the political system and top management. While digitalisation and new technologies have been linked in public debates to fear of significant job reduction, this was not evident at all in our data; almost the opposite, the workers stressed the need for improved technology to handle the workload and staff shortages.
We did find some examples where digitalisation and new technologies have improved the work environment, mainly the physical work environment, through reduction of strenuous and repetitive work, however the overall positive impact on health and safety was reportedly moderate. The results in terms of the psycho-social work environment are more mixed: there were positive examples, but many workers did also emphasise that stress-levels had gone up. Some workers like electricians and technicians highlighted a decline in job autonomy. Yet several workers (for instance in public administration) highlighted how digitalisation had made their job more interesting and stimulating. In sum the impact of digitalisation on job quality can best be described as ambiguous and to a large degree subjective: what for one worker is an improvement in job quality is a decline for another. While the overall impact on job quality is ambiguous, the main tendency seems to be that digitalisation has the potential for improving both public services and the working life of the public sector workers, if implemented and adjusted to the needs of both citizens and these workers.