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Working environment
New beginning — After a year of crisis in the workplace, a change in leadership, and relocation chaos, the Natural History Museum of Denmark managed to achieve a record number of visitors. We spoke to museum director Nina Rønsted about the last, turbulent, year.
Visitors to the Natural History Museum of Denmark (SNM), a University of Copenhagen unit, can currently experience the special exhibition Wild Wonderful World.
The exhibition displays about a thousand carefully selected objects, each chosen to convey SNM’s most fascinating, wild, and eye-catching stories.
And while the exhibition may be a tad nerdy — and not something that museum director Nina Rønsted would dare call a blockbuster — the museum still managed to break its own visitor record again in 2024.
This comes a year after the museum found itself in the middle of a large-scale relocation project and a public debate about its working environment, following reports from anonymous employees in February 2023 in the news medium Frihedsbrevet. They described a workplace culture marked by harassment, bullying, extreme work pressure, and a manager who »didn’t give a damn.«
READ ALSO: Former postdoc at SNM: The museum director abused his power
Museum director Peter Kjærgaard resigned from his position in April 2024. A new leader has now taken over: Professor and former research director at SNM, Nina Rønsted.
To mark the occasion, the University Post visited the museum’s Wild Wonderful World exhibition with the director. She reflects on a year where the museum has had to balance the opening of a new exhibition, and relocation plans while she, as the new director, has been tasked with creating a better working environment.
The old Zoological Museum closed in 2022. And since then, SNM has lacked »that classic museum feel to it,« says Nina Rønsted as we step into the entrance hall of Wild Wonderful World in the museum building that previously housed the Geological Museum opposite the National Gallery of Denmark.
I returned home just as everything exploded here at the museum. It was quite overwhelming.
Nina Rønsted, museum director, SNM
At the entrance, visitors are greeted with a video showing museum staff darting in and out among towering, densely packed shelves. These shelves hold the museum’s collections, which might best be described as a massive jumble of strange, fascinating, and (extinct) animals and objects.
READ ALSO: Director of Natural History Museum quits
»Most people think that the museum’s collections are just what they see in the exhibitions. But many objects never make it to the public — they are used for research or simply stored. And a lot of effort goes into maintaining and preserving them,« says Nina Rønsted, adding that the museum holds more than 14 million objects.
The classic exhibits that some visitors may remember from the Zoological Museum are absent from the new exhibition. This includes the dinosaur skeletons, musk oxen, and the giant sloths.
»They’ve all been sent for restoration. Some of them had been standing there for 40–50 years without anyone taking care of them. So, they really needed a trip to the hairdresser,« the museum director laughs.
The exhibition aims to educate visitors on how objects from the past contribute valuable knowledge to the present — and how the various objects, both big and small, find their way to the museum in the first place.
Visitors learn, for example, that museum objects aren’t only collected by researchers and hobbyists.
»Take this meteorite fragment, for instance,« says Nina Rønsted, pointing to a black rock.
»It was collected by a schoolgirl named Milena, who found it in her schoolyard.«
Elsewhere in the exhibition, visitors can see a small selection of the museum’s 700 polar bear skulls. Here, they can read how the collection of polar bear skulls over time has revealed the increasing levels of pesticides in water and nature, the museum director explains.
»The collections hold an enormous number of stories, which we try to convey through this exhibition. Some are positive. Others reflect methods we would not use today. Like these,« she says, pointing to a group of taxidermied animals.
Two brown bears, a tiger, and a leopard stare out from a glass case, as if they were still alive.
»They were donated by a private hunter many years ago. We wouldn’t shoot large, endangered mammals to stuff and exhibit them nowadays. There is a different perspective on nature now, and more reflection on the purpose of collecting museum specimens,« she says.
Nina Rønsted is a professor of conservation and botany and was previously employed at the Natural History Museum of Denmark from 2011 to 2019. She spent several years living in Hawaii, where she led the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s research on preserving the islands’ rich plant life.
She returned to Denmark and the museum in March 2023 as head of research and, two months later, was appointed interim museum director after Peter Kjærgaard stepped down the previous month.
»I came home just as everything exploded here at the museum. It was quite overwhelming,« she recalls of her first days. There was deep mistrust between management and employees.
»The museum is in the midst of a massive transition, and all employees, exhibitions, and collections need to be relocated. This inevitably creates a more stressful work environment,« she says, adding:
»We obviously had to figure out what had gone so wrong. One of the first things I did was talk to employees. It became clear that the problem was both that they were simply overworked and that the pressure had led to an abrasive workplace tone.«
Employees are here because they find it an exciting place to work, and they are incredibly dedicated. That’s why they also tend to put up with more than what is reasonable.
Nina Rønsted, museum director, SNM
According to Nina Rønsted, there is now »zero tolerance« for both the harsh tone in the workplace and poor working conditions. She believes that both trust and a sense of security have returned to the workplace in many ways.
But she also acknowledges that she may have blind spots and that ensuring a good work environment is challenging when employees are under pressure from something as massive as relocating an entire museum.
»In the autumn, we did a special workplace assessment (APV) in the exhibition department, which was one of the hardest-hit areas in the previous assessment. The results still showed that people felt time pressure and lacked sufficient influence. That kind of thing,« she says, adding:
»But I don’t think the results felt as urgent this time. Restoring trust and making work enjoyable again takes time,« says Nina Rønsted.
Reports on the Frihedsbrevet news site and subsequent coverage by the University Post revealed that employees felt micromanaged and had no influence over their own work.
»Employee influence can be challenging because when we design exhibitions, there has to be consistency. This means that sometimes a manager has to make a final decision. But there are many ways to handle that,« says Nina Rønsted, adding:
»People are more willing to accept that they don’t always have the level of influence they would like when they get an explanation for it, and when their input is actually taken into account.«
When people apply for a job at a museum, it’s rarely because of the salary, says Nina Rønsted.
»Employees are here because they find it an exciting place to work, and they are dedicated. That’s why they also tend to put up with more than what is actually reasonable. This means we have an even greater responsibility to take care of them.«
And that is exactly what Nina Rønsted intends to do. Though she found the beginning overwhelming, she is now fully committed to her new role.
They need to feel that the museum is in safe hands with me. And if they no longer do, then my time here is coming to an end.
Nina Rønsted, Museum Director, SNM
»It’s fantastic to be here. The best part is seeing and experiencing all the synergies between people when you look behind the scenes. I am impressed every day by how skilled everyone is,« she says, adding:
»And I quickly realised that I’m not here just to come in and make decisions. People know what they’re doing.«
The new museum director is determined to take full responsibility for the work environment. And she says that if the employees no longer support her, she should no longer be director.
»Of course, there will be difficult situations. There may come a time when budget cuts lead to layoffs, and no one likes that. So it’s not about employees always being happy and satisfied,« she stresses, adding:
»But they need to feel that the museum is in safe hands with me. And if they no longer do, then my time here is coming to an end.«