In our last issue of Astronology, we wrote about how to make a small company feel big. Well, what if you’re a big company who wants to feel small? How do you make your employees and clients believe that you aren’t “too big” for their needs? Will potential employees even consider working for you if they think that you are just another large corporate environment?

If you have ever done a job search online, you probably came across this description of a company: “large company with a small company feel.”  Many of these promises of having a small company feel go unfulfilled as employees get lost in the shuffle of a large corporate environment. The task then is to fit the value proposition, and find a way to make a big company feel small. Here are some ways that companies have accomplished this goal.

Google, in its 2005 annual report, wrote that “despite our rapid growth, we constantly seek to maintain a small-company feel that promotes interaction and the exchange of ideas among employees. We try to minimize corporate hierarchy to facilitate meaningful communication among employees at all levels and across departments, and we have developed software to help us in this effort. We believe that considering multiple viewpoints is critical to developing effective solutions, and we attempt to build consensus in making decisions. While teamwork is one of our core values, we also significantly reward individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. As we grow, we expect to continue to provide compensation structures that are more similar to those offered by start-ups than established companies. We will focus on very significant rewards for individuals and teams that build amazing things that provide significant value to us and our users.”

To some companies, such as professional service firm AMP, the goal is to generate that small company feel within the organization and provide the resulting benefits to their clients: “We can now provide personalized orientations to incoming officers of our association management clients.” As for AMP’s overall organizational structure, “Our company philosophy to use project ‘teams’ to manage client programs provides enhanced responsiveness to AMP clients. While the program director is the primary client contact, other key staff members in the various functional units of AMP are always accessible.”

But why the need for this approach? AMP says that: “One reason for our small company feel is that we retain staff members who care about those they serve and take a personal interest in being responsive to customer needs. With better trained and more experienced staff, this means that the customer gets the right answer the first time!”

While in some instances a small company feel can benefit employees, in the end the goal is for the customer to also see the benefits.  How does this work? Will the employees’ enjoyment of the small company feel really benefit the clients of the organizations for whom they work?

Technology firm NetApp seems to think so: “We have flexibility for people to work when they need to work. No one’s punching a clock.” Because of this, employees work harder and, in turn, the clients benefit. Google recently was listed by Fortune as the top company to work for. Not coincidentally it’s also one of the fastest growing companies, with a lot of new product development coming from within.

Talk is good, but how can this work in practice? How can you make sure that every employee is happy when there are tens of thousands of employees in a company? How can you find the money, resources, and time needed to do so?

Some large companies, as Theresa Howard wrote in a USA Today article titled “Big companies buy small brands with big values”, are buying smaller brands in order to promote the social responsibility messages for which these smaller brands sometimes are known. These are not just profit driven acquisitions.  Rather, the buyout is also aimed at making the larger companies feel smaller and upholding the values that the buyer may seek when buying their product.

Looking for more suggestions? Here are a few helpful hints from Astron Solutions:

• Make each business segment feel small. If you’re in charge of the Trust department at a big investment bank, make sure that you look after the needs of those people in Trust.  Build up team unity in that department to give it a small feel within the bigger organizational structure.  Team building activities, group lunches, or other “together” activities can create that small company feel.
• Acknowledge individual achievements both in the office and out of it. If an employee has a child or gets married, throw a celebration for them. If they close on a large deal, put their name in the company newsletter or buy lunch the next day for their department.  Make sure people know about employees’ accomplishments.
• Find ways to assuage the needs of individual departments. If an entire hospital has the same work schedule, it may not work as well as reviewing the needs of the nurses and the maintenance staff separately and showing them you care about what’s important to them by developing different schedule opportunities.
• Make sure there’s a lot of interaction between lower level employees and upper management. In a small firm these groups may sit right next to each other.  In a large multinational corporation, they may not even be in the same hemisphere. Make large firm employees feel as important as they do in the small company by inviting them for a Q&A with top management or use an office-less structure, as discussed previously in Astronology, where upper management sits at a desk right next to the rest of the employees.

 Whatever you do, make sure your employees don’t get lost in the shuffle.  Once they do, it’s only a matter of time before your clients – and your bottom line – start feeling that way, too.