I have worked for 2 small businesses and 1 corporation in my short time within the workforce. One thing that surprised me was that the small businesses were far more exploitive and hard to work for than the corporation was. I figured this would be the opposite. I’m not in favor of big corporations, I think they come with unique issues and hold too much power. However, the small businesses were far worse of an experience for me. I think it can fly either way. It can be really good or really bad and it’s hard to wash out the bad in a company so small. Some of the reasons include:
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They paid far less: You’d usually be hired at or below market rate because they don’t have the same hiring budgets as large corporations do. We’d get no benefits or vacations. We got “ 14 days PTO” as a benefit but they didn’t mention to us that we had to stay in the office an extra 3 hours in addition to normal working hours a week to earn that. You’d get shit for taking off the Friday between thanksgiving and Saturday.
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There’s way more room for micromanaging: When I worked for a large corporation, I rarely ever had to talk to the boss. In the small businesses, the company owner was all up in my face everyday, micromanaging everyone because they could.
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No checks and balances: In a small business, there’s no HR, if there is, they are gossiping with and trying to please the company owner. HR isn’t going to help you much in a big corporation but there re literally no checks and balances put into place in these small businesses. Sexual harassment, blatant sexist and racist comments, verbal abuse…it all would fly. I never experienced that in the corporations because there are so many conditions in place to protect the company. It’s really easy to cover that stuff up in a small business and you have nobody to go to when it’s just you and the boss and maybe one or 2 other people.
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No training: Because they have a small staff, training takes up a more resources than it would in a large corporation. The company I worked for would hire young people straight out of college to pay them less, then switch their roles when they didn’t want to hire new people. They’d then get mad when they weren’t performing to the same level of experienced employees within 2 months when they had been given no resources to learn the position.
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We are family: I heard this a lot in small businesses, “We are a family”. Which means they expect you to work long hours and give everything for the company just because they are small and the owner is too cheap to hire more people. They scrimp you for every minute of work.
In both the small companies I worked for, the owners were greedy and just liked having a business so they could control their employees, feel a sense of power, and cook the books.