Have You Talked to Your Chief People Officer Lately?

Published on: Thursday, July 10, 2008       Comments (0)       Category: Human Capital,  Reality Check, 

If you have, then you may have gotten an earful about why your company isn’t keeping its employees as long as you’d like.

If you haven’t, get ready for an earful!

Six key workforce trends are about to make a big impact on your company (if they haven’t already):

1. Shrinking pool of skilled labor
   
2. Changing family structures
   
3. More women entering the workforce than men
   
4. Men admitting to work-life “balance” problems and historic dissatisfaction levels
   
5. Generations X and Y placing equal value on work and home
   
6. New workplace technologies that work so well you’ve got to change
   

Men and women are equally fed-up about the choices they are forced to make to find success advancing the proverbial corporate ladder.  How many more will continue to flee from the organizations to try and build lives that do have significance personally and professionally?  Learn how to implement an elegant framework that considers the four dimensions of individual careers: Pace, Workload, Location and Role in your company by following our posts over the next few days and attending our first GrowingBusinessLink online learning program: Mass Career Customization.

Register at the Oracle Featured Resource Center and be sure to receive an invitation to this signature event featuring Cathy Benko, vice chairman and talent officer for Deloitte and architect of the firm’s own efforts at career customization across large groups of employees. She’ll share first-hand tips on how to build a framework that boosts recruitment and retention and offer insights on how your own career can benefit.

Sure, we have formal and informal flexible work arrangements. But they are tied to jobs, not to people. You can’t build a career on the mommy or daddy track. You can only shift from job to job and company to company in hopes of better pay and a new set of challenges to deal with. Is it any wonder most executives are changing companies every three years (or less)?

And if I can personalize the M&M’s for my company’s trade show booth, why can’t I personalize my career and life plan rather than simply changing companies every time I need to adjust?

Leave it to someone who hired 12,000 people last year to issue the wake-up call companies have needed. “It’s time the workplace catches up with the workforce,” says Cathy Benko, Deloitte vice chairman and head of the talent management practice. But rather than add to the rhetoric, Benko and her colleagues have studied and tested a new approach. They call it Mass Career Customization. In effect, it’s a business plan for replacing the 10 or 50 or 79 flexible work programs at your company with a framework where every employee and every manager accepts in advance that the balances will shift with age and life circumstance and that it is possible to plan for dialing up and dialing back in stead of leaving it to chance.

Cathy Benko will be discussing how to adapt your company’s process and how to look at your own career in a special GrowingBusinessLink.com webinar. Seating at the live presentation is limited. You can receive an invitation by registering at the Oracle Featured Resource Center by noon ET Friday January 18 for the presentation January 22nd.