The Engagement Advantage Small Businesses Can Leverage
There’s been a lot of noise over the past few years about where people work: remote, in-office, or some combination of the two.
In all the hubbub about where teams show up, we’re missing a bigger issue: Are your people engaged? Because if they are not psychologically connected to your company and culture, WFH or hybrid options won’t make much of a difference.
And when it comes to engagement, small and mid-sized businesses have an advantage that too many of them don’t fully appreciate.
I was thinking about this after reading a recent Fast Company article arguing that smaller companies are increasingly well positioned to give younger workers what they actually want from work. The article identifies seven needs: purpose, connected relationships, work that fits people’s skills, fair compensation, lifestyle, growth, and meaning.
For any WhiteWater clients, that list will sound familiar.
We talk constantly about creating organizations where people can contribute their best. That requires clarity of purpose, meaningful work, and putting the right people in the right roles with the right capabilities. And it requires leaders who actually know, care about, and challenge the people they lead.
None of that depends on an office mandate.
Small can be a leadership advantage
One of the most interesting statistics in the Fast Company piece came from Culture Amp. Employees at companies with more than 5,000 people rated their leaders 10 percentage points lower than those at companies with 100 employees or fewer on measures such as confidence in leadership, feeling that people matter, and communicating a motivating vision.
That makes intuitive sense to me. In a small business, the person making the decision may be sitting across the lunch table or just down the hall from the person affected by it. The feedback loop is short. It’s harder for people to become abstractions on a spreadsheet.
Small businesses can also respond faster. They can adjust a role to fit somebody’s strengths. They can have a conversation about flexible hours without having to run it through three levels of bureaucracy. They can find out what matters to an employee because, quite simply, they know them.
That human connection matters. It’s also why I’m skeptical of some of the return-to-office debate. Being able to physically see someone is not the same thing as leading them. If your primary way of knowing whether someone is contributing is seeing them at a desk, you may have a leadership problem rooted in trust and control issues, NOT a location problem.
Proximity isn’t culture
It’s easy for smaller businesses to take all of this for granted. I see it all the time, with leaders who’ll say things like, “We’re only 50 people. Our team knows our values.”
That’s usually an assumption, not a confirmed fact. And even if it is true now, what happens when you’re 100 people, or when a new team member joins?
We’ve been working with a growing company where, when we initially interviewed its roughly 50 employees, virtually everyone independently used the same phrase to describe the workplace: “It feels like family.”
Many companies make this claim, but few have this level of employee sentiment.
Even more strikingly, many younger employees told us they wanted the company to introduce a 401(k). When we asked why, it wasn’t just about money: They wanted to be able to retire there.
Reflect on that for a minute. In an era when we talk constantly about job hopping and disengagement, here were people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s imagining spending the rest of their careers with one employer.
That is an extraordinary competitive advantage. It is also fragile.
Everything breaks at scale, including culture
One of our mantras at WhiteWater is that everything breaks at scale.
As businesses grow, they need different systems, processes, structure, and specialization. Step-change growth needs new leaders. Along the way, communication gets more complicated, and a sense of disconnect can set in when the founder can’t have lunch with everybody anymore.
All of those things are necessary. They can also slowly destroy exactly what made the organization special in the first place. That’s why culture has to move from something you experience accidentally to something you build intentionally.
Get clear about your purpose, and articulate the values that matter, then hire and promote against them. Define which behaviours are in bounds and which are out of bounds. Create opportunities for people to grow. Develop leaders who can build real relationships rather than simply manage tasks. Ask people what they need, and truly listen to the answers.
It’s not complicated, but it’s not easy either. This is hard work. But it’s well worth it. The Fast Company article notes that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Its recommendations include direct relationships with leaders, flexibility, meaningful two-way performance conversations, clear purpose, and values demonstrated through everyday behaviour.
Small and mid-sized businesses have an opportunity right now. Their size can make them faster, more flexible, more connected, and more human than their much larger competitors.
Just as WFH or hybrid won’t fix your engagement issues, being small doesn’t automatically make you a great place to work. It takes knowing what makes your organization worth caring about and doing the hard leadership work to ensure you don’t lose it as you grow.
Put this into practice: Courageous Communications
Culture comes down to the conversations people are willing to have. Whether you have 20 people or 200, the leaders who keep people engaged are the ones who ask what their team needs, give feedback early and say the hard thing with care.
If you are in the Fredericton area, that is exactly what we practice in Courageous Communications: The Leader’s Code. It is a practical half day workshop with Sean Ryan. You work through real scenarios, get feedback in the room and leave with something you can use the next morning.
November 3, 2026
8:00 AM to 12:00 PM AT
Delta Hotels Fredericton
$179, registration closes October 30
Comments