Welcome back to the HR Connection podcast. I am your host, Sabrina Baker, CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions.

Today, I wanted to highlight the biggest differences between managing human resources in a small environment versus its much larger counterparts.

Before I jump into that, let me explain why we say 1 to 500 for small employers. I mentioned in the first episode, if you were able to catch that, that in that 1 to 500 range, you can have a wide variety of individuals managing human resources. You can have an HR department of one, you can have a CEO who's just kind of winging it. You can have that guy in marketing who is good at putting together an employee event that one time and now suddenly they are the HR person as well. Uh, you can have a small HR team if you're on the larger side of that employee population. It can be so very different even between two companies that both have around 50 employees. One may have an HR department of one, and another one may have no HR.

So, the vast difference in organizations and how they manage HR under 500 employees is very, very different than in a much larger organization, 500 and above. At the 500 mark, that's where we start to see some very similar structure. If you go and look at just the structure, meaning the types of roles HR roles that are inside of Google and Apple, they're probably pretty similar. It's probably a very similar structure, and they have the similar types of roles. Even when you get to 1,000 employees, 2,000 employees, it's going to be way more standard across industry, across employee population. You'll have maybe a director, a manager, and a generalist. It's going to be a little nuanced, but pretty much the same structure for all of those organizations.

Where again, under that 500, it's kind of the wild, wild west. It's anybody's guess.

Let's talk about some of those major differences.

If you're managing human resources in one of those environments, let's see if any of these resonate with you.

The first one is the reason that you can have so many different types of people managing HR in a small space. And that is priorities.

In a small environment, especially in super small and especially if we're talking like startup range, Series A, B, maybe even into C, you have a different priority set than you do in a much larger organization. If they are in series funding mode, if they are in startup mode, if they are fairly new as a business, their priority might just be getting to profitability. It might just be building up the first product, launching the first product. It is all about getting into the black, figuring out how do we make a profitable organization.

Inside of that, the CEO is really going to decide how much of a priority human resources is. This is why we can say that in a 50-employee organization, some organizations are going to have a dedicated HR person and others are not. And it's because the priority of the founder, the priority of that CEO, really dictates what the organization is working on.

The biggest priority they have is getting to profitability. And if they've gotten to profitability, then it's maintaining it. It's maintaining it and scaling upwards to whatever it is that they're trying to do.

In a much larger organization, those priorities are different. If you are talking about a public organization, then shareholders are obviously a priority. Shareholder preference, shareholder demands are obviously going to be your bigger priorities. And maybe just maintaining market share, gaining market share, dealing with economic shifts, those are going to be priorities that are different than in a much smaller space.

The next difference, and this one is so obvious, is budgets.

Small employers are not bleeding money. They do not have extra thousands of dollars lying around to just do whatever they want or throw money at a problem. Every single dollar counts. Every penny is counted. They have to manage their money in a way that makes sure they can get to profitability, that they can scale as needed, that they can add employees when demand is there, and that they can buy inventory if that's what they need to do.

Budgets are very limited. There's not a lot of fluff. There's not a lot of extra. Every dollar that is spent needs to be working towards their goal.

Obviously, in a much larger counterpart, that's different. You could have a little extra in budgets. There could be way more leeway. It could be easy to throw money at a situation by hiring extra people or whatever it is. But the budget difference is a huge one.

In many of our clients, in many small employers, there is no HR budget. There is no employee budget. And anytime that we want to do an HR program, or they even think about investing in our services, it's an investment. It's something that they really have to stop and take time to think about. Is this worth doing? Is this something that I really need?

I'm a small employer business owner myself, and this is so true for me. While we are profitable and have been for many years, I still have to think about adding big things to the business that will cost a lot of money. It’s an investment for me, and I have to make sure that it is going to help me reach my goals.

And so, budget is an obvious one, but it's a huge difference between small employers and their larger counterparts.

Right along with budgets is resources. In small employers, you often have many people wearing many different hats.

I joke all the time about the marketing person or the finance person who, you know, did one good employee event and all of a sudden they are the HR person. But it's not just HR that's added on to other people's jobs. It's all kinds of things. It can be a situation where you come in and you have one role, and then suddenly you are doing something completely outside of that, something that you've never, ever done. Because resources are limited.

We only have so much budget that we can hire employees with. So, we’ve got to multitask a little bit. We’ve got to all learn how to wear multiple hats and do multiple things to make sure the company is getting what they need.

Obviously, in a much larger organization, you are not going to have that—specifically in HR. Even just being an HR department of one, let's just say that the person gets to focus just on HR. They're still managing every discipline of HR. I think there are like nine disciplines under HR if you think about benefits and payroll, recruiting, performance management. All of these things that one person has to manage and be an expert in.

Where in a much larger organization, you're going to have a team. You're going to have a dedicated recruiter, a dedicated benefits person, somebody managing leaves. It’s not a situation in your larger counterparts where anyone in the business is wearing multiple hats.

And yet, in a small organization, even the CEO is CEO, COO, chief revenue officer—they could be the entire C-suite for a long time because they don’t have the budget to hire all the individual people that they need.

Here's what I think is cool about that, and why I love working in small environments: you get to learn so much.

I share with my staff all the time that we are not a big business. We are not making tens of millions of dollars every year where I can throw all of these benefits and great perks at them. But the one thing I know I can give them is learning opportunities.

I know even six months or a year in my organization, they are going to learn so much. And I think working inside a small environment, you certainly have to be the right type of person. But you get to have the freedom to jump into many different areas that may be of interest to you, or just to learn something new.

While it can be overwhelming and of course there’s so much to do in a day, it’s also fun to stretch yourself and think outside the box a little bit and jump out of your comfort zone because that's what’s needed for everybody to survive inside the business.

I spoke in the first episode about small employers feeling like a small town, and man, is that true. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s in everybody’s business. You don’t even have to gossip in a small employer because you just hear everything. You just know what’s going on. People are related to each other.

The same person that’s flying the plane is also checking the bags and pushing you through security. It’s very much like a small-town feel.

Versus a much larger counterpart, where people are just kind of lost in the crowd.

As an HR professional in a large environment, you're not going to talk to every employee. You're not going to know every employee. You’re certainly not going to know them on a personal level about their family and their kids and their hobbies.

You will absolutely get that in a small environment. It’s one of those situations where you get to personalize and kind of customize a relationship with every single person inside the organization. If there’s only 20 of you, it's very easy to be close to everybody, to talk to everybody, to know what’s going on with everybody.

And it certainly presents challenges because, again, everybody’s in everybody’s business. You have this closeness that can sometimes feel, I don’t like to use the word “family,” but it can sometimes feel that way. If you're working closely together, you become really close, almost like fighting with someone—a brother or sister.

That happens in small organizations. It’s certainly a challenge, but I also think that as an HR professional, I like being able to know everybody that I’m interacting with. I like being able to know