How to handle the transition from a small to large company

As someone who has made the transition between small (<30 employees) and large firms (>20,000 employees), I can say with certainty that the move can be a bit of a culture shock. There are many pros and cons to working in each and it is impossible to say than one is better than the other in all cases.

Working in a large company is not always better than working in a small one. Being in a startup can be risky or rewarding - being employed at a large company can make you feel insignificant or very influential. However, it all depends on your particular situation. If you are considering moving from a small company to a large one or even if you have just moved in the opposite direction, here are some tips that will ease the transition for you.

Responsibilities

By their very nature, small companies tend to be quite dynamic and often need generalists who can turn their hand to anything if called upon to do so. Larger companies can afford to have specialists in niche areas who may not have a broad range of skills but will be very good at the job for which they were hired. If you're used to working at a small company, you have probably been in a situation where your boss has asked you to do something and you don't know where to start. Shortly afterwards, you realise that despite this, you are the only person in the company with the skills to attempt it. This brings home a real sense of responsibility as it becomes clear that you have to succeed. In larger companies, it can be easy to pass tasks that you don't immediately know how to do on to an "expert". Sometimes it appropriate to do so but it is always worth ensuring that you are doing this for the right reasons.

Meetings, conference calls and town halls

Often in a small company or with a small team, everyone sits in the same vicinity and talks to the rest of the team every day. This reduces the need for formal meetings or conference calls to situations where external clients are involved. In larger companies often with teams distributed about a large building, perhaps even in different cities or on different continents, these regular update meetings and conference calls are a necessary means of keeping everyone aware of what is happening. They also help to focus teams on the most important tasks. The dubiously named town hall meetings usually involve an entire department or division and happen quarterly or thereabouts. Although initially it may feel like these meetings take up a lot of time for very little benefit, they will help you in the long-term as they will keep you aware of the bigger picture of corporate objectives as well as providing an insight into the activities of other teams, which can often help your team to be more effective.

Processes

At an SME, the process for a team leader getting some new servers might involve sending an email to or having a meeting with the IT director. He or she will approve (or deny) the request and then pass it to the financial director for final approval before going ahead and ordering the kit. The servers then arrive and are passed to the team leader to set up. This can take a day or two for approval and then a couple of weeks before the ordered kit actually arrives, then a further day or two to set it up.

At a large company, this is more likely to be tied in with a team budget, which requires sign-off by the department head followed by a longer procurement process to get the servers ordered and delivered at agreed corporate rates from approved suppliers. This can take weeks for approval and months for delivery. Then another few weeks while the infrastructure team get the kit installed in the data centre and another week or two for another infrastructure team to install the operating system and software before handing it off to the application team for use.

Some companies are more efficient than others at this process but in general, procurement is something that will take longer at a larger firm. Generally, the lead-time is increased but with the benefit that costs can be centrally managed and controlled.

Other processes like software installation can sometimes be much faster at large companies if they have a good IT service management process in place (see previous article about this here). Instead of having to get approval, order the software, download or await delivery and install it, you can often request the software via the help desk, get approval from your manager and the infrastructure team can have it installed within minutes because the large company has a site license for the software and the means to push it out to your computer quickly.

Pay and conditions

In smaller companies where revenue streams are not as large or constant as in larger companies, wages are likely to be smaller. For some very small outfits, it is not unheard of for payment to employees to be delayed by a month if revenues have been particularly bad. This does not usually happen at larger well-established firms, who can often also provide benefits like private medical insurance, discounts with some retailers and they usually contribute a percentage of your salary to a pension scheme. However, if you're a star performer at a small firm, you can sometimes gain a reasonable amount of equity. This can be very rewarding in the long-term if the value of the company grows considerably in value. Becoming a significant shareholder in a larger company is usually something you'd have to become fairly senior to achieve.