Cathy Benko is Deloitte’s chief talent officer and coauthor of Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce. She is also responsible for driving Deloitte’s strategy to attract, develop, and advance a highly skilled and increasingly diverse workforce. This includes Deloitte’s pioneering approach to employee engagement and career-life integration called Mass Career Customization. Deloitte began the progam by crafting a conceptual response to the misalignment between today’s workplace and today’s workforce, and subsequently spent several years piloting the program in various ways. Currently, MCC rollouts, comprising approximately 20 percent of Deloitte’s U.S. organization, are underway across various businesses this fiscal year, with the remainder to follow in 2009. CW Bulletin asked Benko about this innovative program and how it’s been implemented.
What are some of the benefits of Mass Career Customization, as it relates to work-life balance? Who participates in this initiative?
Mass Career Customization is about simply creating an environment that supports how careers are being built. MCC provides a framework in which every employee, in conjunction with his or her manager, can tailor his or her career path within the organization over time. The framework articulates a definite, not infinite, set of options along the four core dimensions of a career:
- Pace: options about the rate at which a person’s career progresses.
- Workload: choices about the quantity of work output.
- Location/schedule: options for when and where work is performed.
- Role: choices in position and responsibilities.
Employees partner with their managers to customize their careers by selecting the option along each of the four dimensions that most closely matches their career objectives, keeping in mind their life circumstances and the needs of the business at any given point in time. These choices are registered on an MCC profile.
The MCC profile can be adjusted over time. It allows employees to adjust their activities along the four dimensions in order to optimize their career paths at varying life stages (what we refer to as dialing up or down). The goal is to calibrate the settings to the desired mix as each individual’s personal and career situations evolve.
MCC acknowledges that careers ebb and flow, in large part due to people’s changing life circumstances. So the framework allows people to fit their work into their life, and their life into their work, over the long term. The framework is applicable to all audiences since “career-life fit” (we prefer the term “career-life” since careers are part of our lives, rather than opposing forces) is not just a challenge that is facing women.
A common concern on the part of employers is that MCC will open the floodgates of people who want to dial down or decelerate their careers. Interestingly, we now have over two years of data that simply doesn’t support this concern. In fact, Deloitte has witnessed just the opposite—most people do not want to change their level of contributions within the organization at all, but for those who do, the vast majority have inquired about dialing up—essentially accelerating their careers—rather than dialing down. Through our current rollouts, over 90 percent of our organization has registered a “common” profile, and of those who have customized their profiles, the dial-ups clearly outnumber the dial-downs.
In a press release, you are quoted as saying, “Never before has the collective face of the employee changed so much in so little time. Men and women, Gen Y and baby boomers are all looking for alternatives to the one-size-fits-all approach of the proverbial corporate ladder.” What are these employees looking for in terms of work-life balance? How is the Mass Career Customization program meeting their needs?
What today’s workers are looking for is a way to better fit their work into their lives, and their lives into their work. Is this any different than in previous generations? In a word: Yes. Today, workforce trends are converging in a way that requires an extraordinary response from employers. These trends include the first wave of baby boomers getting set to retire, with an inadequate supply of workers to replace them, as well as a fundamental shift in family structures. Today only 17 percent of households have a spouse at home full time, down from 63 percent in past generations. In short, today’s workplace norms are predicated on a workforce composition that no longer exists.
Today’s workers—both men and women, and across generations—are looking for options that allow them to tailor their career paths over time to better align with various life stages. This is not “new” behavior—rather, it has been going on for some time, with individuals making decisions to move in and out of organizations (or in the case of many women, out of the workplace altogether), often without the support or structure from their employers. On average, today’s boomers held over 10 different jobs when they were between the ages of 18 and 40, and this trend only increases when looking at today’s younger generations. The increasing mobility is evident in U.S. Department of Labor national tenure figures. As of 2006, the median tenure for workers ages 55–64 in the U.S. was 9.3 years. For workers in the 25–34 age group, the median tenure was 2.9 years.
About one in three employees has recently been approached by another firm hoping to lure them away, and 77 percent of workers aged 36 to 40—those generally right in the pipeline for leadership—last less than five years in new jobs.
When you step back, what’s really happening is that the corporate ladder—which has long been the gold standard of corporate success—is giving way to a more adaptive mental model that we dub the “corporate lattice.”™ A lattice organization allows for multiple paths upward through the organization, taking into account the changing needs of both the individual and the organization across various intervals of time.
What have been the results of MCC for employees and for the organization? Can you provide specific examples?
The greatest benefit we are seeing with MCC is essentially in its option value. Employees benefit from the comfort of knowing they have the choice to customize their careers as their priorities change over time (whether or not the options are ever exercised). The benefits to the organization are greater employee loyalty, reduced costs associated with talent acquisition and reduced business disruption associated with employee turnover.
I’ll give you an example of how MCC has benefited one of our senior managers in the Northeast region. Roger is a high performing consultant who has customized his career path by easing up on the Location/Schedule dimension of the mass career customization framework. The trade-off is that his Pace, or progression towards partnership, may be slowed down. The primary benefit to him is that he can continue to contribute to and develop with the organization, while also allowing more time for managing his personal life during a critical period. The primary benefit to Deloitte in allowing Roger to scale back on his schedule is that we retain a highly talented consultant who not only contributes to client service, but also acts as a role model for others.
Even our CEO, Barry Salzberg, and our chairman, Sharon Allen, have had periods in their careers when they have dialed down. Clearly they’re fully dialed up in their current roles, but their career paths have ebbed and flowed rather than being a straight path of career progression.
While this seems like a more natural approach to career progression for younger workers, we find that another group of workers, pre-retirees (or what we sometimes refer to as twilight workers), are also very much attracted to this notion of customizing careers. We’re finding that more and more are interested in options beyond the all-or-nothing approach of the traditional corporate ladder model.
How do you measure the success of this program?
Similar to results companies derive from mass product customization, we are finding that costs (of talent acquisition) are decreasing and loyalty is increasing. More specifically, we are using metrics, including retention and utilization measures, financial benefits, as well as satisfaction and intent to stay survey results. A powerful interim measure of success is the impact on internal referrals to Deloitte, which has increased significantly among those who are included in our 2008 mass career customization roll-outs.
What have been the obstacles in implementing this program?
Interestingly, the biggest obstacle is not at all the one we predicted. We thought that getting people to buy into the fact that the very nature of career progression was changing and therefore required an extraordinary response would be difficult, but this came rather easily. It seems that many had already observed this trend happening. Providing a cogent identification of these trends and the way they were converging really helped put it all into place.
The biggest implementation challenge, though relatively small compared to what we were expecting, is fully integrating the program into existing talent management processes, including goal-setting, performance management, and rewards and recognition. It’s here that we have seen some long-held beliefs come to the surface. One such belief is the ill-informed view that this is a women’s issue. MCC is a response to the needs of the changing workforce—and not just the women in the workforce. As such, individual participants will not be perceived as wanting “special treatment” but rather will appreciate that individuals (including themselves) are at differing points in the ebb and flow of their careers. In fact, our research has shown that a key reason that flexible work agreements (FWAs) have not met with greater success is that they are viewed as exceptions or individual accommodations to an outmoded workplace standard. The structure and needs of the workforce have fundamentally changed, and it’s time for the workplace to change in response.
Do you have any tips or ideas for how organizations can implement their own work-life balance program?
Starting to look at things through a “career-life fit” lens certainly helps, as well as adopting a corporate lattice mental model. At the end of the day, Mass Career Customization is not simply a work-life program, but rather a culture change effort that transforms the incumbent model of how careers are built.
While you need staunch leadership support to drive significant change, you can also start to build interest and early momentum by developing your company’s specific business case. While we identify and discuss the broad trends in the book that are changing the workforce in a profound, irrevocable way, these trends can be further defined for your specific business and industry.
In addition, leverage the power of the existing stories you already have. Collect and call out stories of successful people within your organization whose career progressions have ebbed and flowed rather than being a straight climb up the corporate ladder. This is a powerful way to show that career customization is already going on—just not perhaps in a systemic, organized fashion. Ultimately, you may also want to pilot a career customization program within your own group—taking care to track key metrics before and after—so that you can build a track record for the broader organization and lay the foundation for a successful implementation.
