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Mass Career Customization
January 27, 2009
If you think you've tried it all when it comes to professional development of your workforce, there's a new model for how careers are built that might surprise you.
By Cathy Benko and Anne Weisberg
Sweeping changes in the way we work, live, and build careers have been gathering momentum as the workforce has become increasingly diverse in every dimension—from gender to generation, from family structure to personal background. To date, the most popular corporate response to these changes has been flexible work arrangements (FWAs). Throughout the 1980s and '90s, many companies introduced policies such as flexible work schedules, job sharing, and telecommuting as a way to create options for their employees.
But FWAs have failed to close the growing misalignment between the workplace and the workforce or to deliver increased employee satisfaction and loyalty. Rather, this misalignment can be addressed only by acknowledging the "one size fits all" approach to career progression and development, exemplified by the proverbial corporate ladder, is evolving towards a corporate lattice model that offers more varied paths for growth and development. In order to organize and enable this transition, we have designed Mass Career Customization (MCC), a structured approach for organizations and their people to identify options, make choices, and agree on trade-offs to ensure value is created for both the business and the individual.
Workforce Trends Convergence
Why not just invest more effort in FWAs? There are several reasons. First, utilization rates remain well below the percentage of employees who report wanting flexibility. In public accounting firms, for example, working conditions and work-life issues remain the most prevalent reasons for leaving—despite aggressive implementation of FWAs. Many Fortune 500 companies have implemented FWA policies to retain talented women, yet the turnover rate for women continues to be higher than for men. In the legal profession, more than 20 percent of men and women are interested in reduced work schedules, yet only 4 percent of lawyers take advantage of such programs.
A key reason for this is the stigma attached to FWAs. Across the board, deviations from the norm of working continuously full-time are thought to be risky. FWAs are, in fact, widely perceived as a signal of an employee's lack of ambition and commitment. The Families and Work Institute found that close to 40 percent of working parents believe their jobs would be in jeopardy if they worked flexibly. Even slowing down for a time is risky. A mere 24 percent of executive women and 33 percent of executive men thought they could turn down a promotion for family or personal reasons without a career penalty.
In addition, the usefulness of FWAs has been limited by their focus on the job at the moment rather than the career over time. FWAs are exceptions to the norm—point solutions that do not scale nor address the misalignment between the workplace and the evolving needs of the workforce. In short, FWAs lack connection with the construct of careers. This disconnect is heightened by the fact that, increasingly, the careers of knowledge workers are not a straight climb up the corporate ladder but rather an undulating journey of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents. Today’s knowledge workers already are building lattice-like careers by moving in and out of organizations and up and down hierarchies, albeit often without support or structure from their employers.
Mass Career Customization (MCC) offers a model of career progression and a supporting framework that identifies, develops, and advances talent in ways that go well beyond FWAs. The MCC framework articulates a definite, not infinite, set of options along four interrelated dimensions of a career—Pace, Workload, Location/Schedule, and Role. In collaboration with their managers, employees periodically select options within each dimension based on their career objectives and life circumstances at a given point in time and within the context of the needs of the business. These choices are reflected in the MCC profile. The MCC "common" profile, shown below, depicts what most employees' profiles will look like at any particular point in time. Even though this profile is common, it too reflects a choice each individual is making about his or her career-life fit.
MCC Common Profile
While most employees' MCC profiles will display common attributes, over time each employee's MCC profile will exhibit its own path, recording the series of choices made over the course of his or her career. For many, this path will look like a sine wave of sorts, with climbing and falling levels of contribution over time, as illustrated below. In this way, MCC provides a structure and process that better aligns the workplace with the realities of today's workforce.
MCC Sine Wave Profile
MCC is analogous to the trend over the last decade or so toward mass product customization. We are increasingly familiar with products in our daily lives—everything from specialized coffees to postage stamps, ring tones, jeans, and even M&Ms—that enable us to tailor a variety of products and services to our individual preferences. Replacing one-size-fits-all products with customized offerings, mass product customization has resulted in lower costs, higher profit margins, greater customer satisfaction, and increased brand loyalty.
These benefits are readily transferable to MCC. MCC moves organizations away from the traditional model of career progression toward more varied, individualized paths. Similar to mass product customization, MCC delivers a competitive advantage through improved employee satisfaction, lower costs related to employee churn, and increased retention and loyalty.
Mass Customization Shared Benefits
Additionally, since all employees take part, any perceived stigma is eliminated—MCC simply becomes the way business is done. MCC also takes into account individual life circumstances as they occur over the course of a career. Many employees will choose to accelerate or decelerate their careers at some point and later revisit their choices as circumstances evolve. At these times, employees and their managers clarify business expectations, goals, performance expectations, and associated rewards. This high degree of transparency allows trade-offs to be articulated and understood. As a result, MCC addresses the limitations of FWAs and enables the corporate-lattice mindset, resulting in increased organizational capacity to keep employees engaged and connected.
Cathy Benko, vice chairman and chief talent officer for Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, is responsible for driving the organization's commitment to attract, develop, and advance a skilled and diverse workforce. Anne Weisberg is a director specializing in talent diversity for the Deloitte U.S. Firms. She is a specialist in the field of gender and work/life integration.
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