Are Small Businesses More Family Friendly?

by Emily McMackin

An article in the June/July issue of MyBusiness, "The Lure of Small," explored why employees are leaving corporate America to work for small businesses. According to a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Center for Leadership, many women who have taken time off from the corporate world and want to return to work are finding more opportunity at small businesses.

The study, titled "Back in the Game," surveyed 100 female employees in senior management positions who took at least two years off from their corporate jobs and have or are trying to return to the workforce. More than half of the women surveyed accepted jobs at smaller companies the second time around.

"Small business is more inviting to women who want to come back," says Monica McGrath, co-author of the study and an adjunct professor of management at Wharton. The main reasons for this? Small businesses offer:

A family-friendly working environment. Many of the women surveyed left the corporate world to raise children or tend to families and returned to the workforce to find their values more in sync with a small-business environment, McGrath says. Small businesses offered them a better work-life balance. Though the corporations they came from had job sharing and flex-time policies in place, executives rarely enforced them, and the women "didn't feel like the policies were consistent with their experiences."

"The implication was that if they couldn't be there for all the meetings, they weren't serious enough about their career," McGrath says.

An open door. Women trying to reenter the corporate world often had trouble getting rehired into their old positions. Interviews with human resource executives revealed that corporations "were reluctant to hire them because if they stepped out once, they would do it again," and retraining and retaining them would cost too much. At smaller companies, "women felt they could get to the decisionmaker and show their capacity and competency to the organization," McGrath says.