The 10 Best Consulting Firms to Work For, 2003 - Hewitt Associates

Nearly 18 months after Hewitt's initial public offering, consultants' fears that they would lose the good parts of their culture appear to be easing. But changes are still afoot, and they are learning to adjust to the new way of doing things.
"Since becoming a public company, we've lost some of the informality and open sharing of information," says a benefits consultant who joined the firm five years ago. "This has been challenging for some who were accustomed to the old culture. The new culture still has roots in the old, but with a lot more discipline — though that's not such a bad thing."

Hewitt, an outsourcing and consulting firm, is one of only two publicly held corporations on our Best Firms to Work For list this year. And while a few cynics complain that the firm makes some decisions to please Wall Street, the levels of negativity reach nowhere near the fervor of those at their publicly held rivals.
There are new processes and some additional bureaucracy to get used to, consultants tell us, but for the most part, it seems that Hewitt's culture has not changed too much. It's still an egalitarian culture that has no room for people who want to be recognized — or rewarded — as superstars. The benefit-of-the-doubt approach to colleagues still predominates, as well as coworkers' lack of directness when they disagree with one another. Experienced hires are still having trouble assimilating and figuring out how the relationship-based, "no titles" organization works.
"Our consensus-driven culture and matrix structure doesn't always make us the fastest, but we usually come up with the best answer," says a New York–based principal.