I will never work at a bank again
A job as a corporate adviser was an obvious and good choice for Kristine Winther Thomsen – until she could no longer make it work with family life and everything else in life that does not revolve around work. "It became too inflexible and outdated for my life."
Pig farm and family life
Today, she works with her husband, Jens, on his family farm dating back six generations. She also grew up in the area, and they became a couple already during upper secondary school.
The spacious farmhouse has a beautiful view of the large garden, the Little Belt and its peninsulas. The piggery holds about 500 pigs, primarily young females, known as gilts, which are sold to other pig farmers as breeding animals.
"I don't know much about pigs. I'm in charge of the administrative aspects of finances, budgets and staff. I've for instance just held job interviews," Kristine Winther Thomsen says.
She is also the one who makes sure that the staff of six are served rolls with ham or cheese every morning during their coffee break.
"My most important job on the farm, besides managing the financials, is to ensure the well-being of our employees – so they, in turn, make sure that our pigs are doing really well."
Football coaching and local politics
By switching to working on the farm, she has also freed up time to establish more football teams for children in Ebberup. She coaches the teams, and her seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, plays for one of them.
The players are fetched from and brought back to the after-school care facility (SFO) to relieve the parents of that task, and that is popular among most, explains Kristine Winther Thomsen. She has played football herself since she was a child.
At the turn of the year, she was also elected to the city council for the Liberal-Democratic Party in Assens and gained a seat on the Culture and Leisure Committee. She is excited about the opportunity, as a local politician, to help make decisions:
"Eventually, only the credit department at the bank was allowed to do that," she smiles and appears to be genuinely pleased with her new working life:
"It makes a world of difference that I now have time during the week that I didn’t have before. We can be impulsive; fetch the children early and go sledging. That's wonderful."
She explains that, more than anything, it's about flexibility:
"Life on the farm is every bit as busy as it was when I worked at the bank. But being able to plan my own day makes all the difference." She is not opposed to working in finance again some time, outside the farm.
"It has nothing to do with not wanting to contribute or work anywhere else. But banks, at least those I've worked for, should give employees more possibilities for planning their own work days."
Obvious choice
She thinks it's a pity that banks are not more innovative.
"I've always wanted to work in a bank. I was good at math and loved counting my pocket money when I was a child. When my dad told me that's what they do at a bank, it was an obvious choice."
The core work did not disappoint. Although she ended up quitting her first job as a corporate adviser when she felt too unmotivated and under pressure family-wise, she gave it another try after a while and went for a job interview at another bank.
And to her own surprise she got the job.
20 weeks pregnant when hired
"At that time, I was 20 weeks pregnant with our third daughter and
didn't expect to stand a chance of getting the job. But they showed understanding, and I was presented with lots of great opportunities," says Kristine Winther Thomsen.
She looked forward to a job with the attractive flexibility the family wished for and, in addition, ample opportunity for development.
"I love learning new things, so it seemed like the right place."
Unfortunately, the promises were not kept.
"I wasn't offered the opportunity for development I had been promised. I tried to tell them about the challenges that the rigid structure caused in our life with three little children."
Outdated culture
She did feel, nonetheless, that they listened to her at work, and that they understood, but still it wasn't enough.
"In the end, decisions were made based on the needs of the bank rather than the needs and wishes of the employees," she states.
"The culture at the bank made it difficult to leave at 15:30, if that's when you needed to go. You were expected to stay till four o'clock. Even though everyone had switched off their brains and just needed to get home. It's so outdated."
That's why she ended up quitting her second bank job last autumn. She has not, as mentioned, abandoned the idea of getting a job again, preferably within finance:
"It just won't be in a bank. Besides the inflexibility in terms of family life, the rules have become so strict that you're no longer able to meet customers and actually have an impact on the result. And that's what I really liked when I started working in the sector."
She encourages the sector, in future, to focus more on the personal profiles of employees and plan the tasks based on those profiles:
"As a profile, I'm very outgoing and motivated by customer contact, advice and development, whereas I'm demotivated by administrative tasks – and they eventually took up 70 per cent of my work at the bank."
On the other hand, she says that she had colleagues who loved the administrative aspect of computer work:
"They were intimidated by the prospect of having to find new customers. Why not help each other and do what we do best?"