Mass Career Customization: Customizing Career Paths to Grow Critical Talent
If you had the opportunity to customize pace, workload, location/schedule, and role to match your lifecycle, would you? Let us know how you were able to match your work life to your real life.
What do you get when you combine: a shrinking pool of skilled labor; non-traditional family structures; an increasing number of women in the workforce; the changing expectations of men; the evolving needs of Generations X and Y; and the increasing impact of technology? You get an antiquated workplace model that can’t sustain itself.
What is the primary issue facing your organization in attracting and retaining talent?
Source: GrowingBusinessLink.com program, Mass Career Customization, 2008
As a result, Deloitte has pioneered the concept of Mass Career Customization, which tackled the question: “If you can customize products and services, why not your career?”
In their book, co-authors Cathleen Benko, Deloitte’s vice chairman and chief talent officer, and Anne Weisberg, senior advisor to Deloitte’s Women’s Initiative, take open-minded organizations through the rationale and steps toward creating work/life and retention solutions that reflect the needs of a new workforce. “The workplace of today was predicated on norms that no longer exist,” Benko told an audience of international professionals in a presentation sponsored by GrowingBusinessLink.com.
“The workforce has changed, but the workplace has not,” Benko continued, and companies currently address the misalignment by offering flexible work arrangements (FWAs). But the response to a flash poll during the presentation reinforced what Benko and Weisberg already found in their research: FWAs are not an overwhelming success. They are often viewed as accommodations and not an organizational standard, and are usually negotiated during crisis. “FWAs are not bad, not wrong, an evolutionary step. It can be a successful arrangement but, unlike MCC, not for all people, all the time,” said Benko.
How successful are FWAs considered within your organization?
Source: GrowingBusinessLink.com program, Mass Career Customization, 2008
MCC is a measurable, systemic and equitable program that provides more than just flexibility, as Benko said its greatest worth is its option value. “The psychic comfort afforded by the ability to customize the levels of career engagement as priorities change over time.”
What Deloitte found during its two year pilot program and first year roll-out is that most employees don’t want to design their careers very differently than their current schedule. Although the biggest surprise, Benko said, was that there were many who wanted to accelerate more quickly rather than “dial down.”
Looking back, have you ever formally or informally “dialed up or dialed down” your career?
Source: GrowingBusinessLink.com program, Mass Career Customization, 2008
