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Crosswind Factors C29

But surely, you might say, don’t large companies have resources at
their disposal to counteract this trend? For example, isn’t it common
knowledge that employee benefits are better at larger employers? Ac-
cording to our studies, the answer is no—Figure 2.2 shows the total
mean score of the two employee benefits survey items on the Quantum
Workplace survey. Even in this area, where one might assume larger
employers have an advantage, we find this crosswind factor serves to
penalize larger employers.

Figure 2.2

This finding goes against what we initially expected. How
could smaller employers have an advantage over larger employers
when it came to benefits? It turns out that a number of our initial
thoughts were off the mark regarding the power of the tipping
point.
An additional dynamic that comes with increasing employee pop-
ulations is the distance between the top leaders of the company and
other employees—the layers of hierarchy from the “boardroom to the