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Deloitte's
Mass Career Customization
In
their book, Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace
with Today's Nontraditional Workforce, and their article, Implementing
a corporate career lattice: the Mass Career Customization model,
Cathleen Benko, Vice Chairman and Chief Talent Officer for Deloitte
& Touche USA LLP and its subsidiaries, and Anne Weisberg,
a Director specializing in talent diversity for Deloitte's U.S.
Firms, explain how the convergence of six workforce trends-a knowledge
worker shortfall; changing family structures; more, better educated
women; changing expectations of men; different expectations of
Generations X and Y; and technological advances-"taken together,
signal the end of the 'normal' career path and work pattern"
and require employers to adopt a new model that better fits the
current and future workforce. Deloitte calls the new framework
it designed "to facilitate the progression from a corporate
ladder to corporate lattice culture-mass career customization
(MCC)™."
"Mass
Career Customization" attempts a paradigm shift to allow
all employees-in partnership with their employer-to create a customized
career path. The idea, borrowing from the business approach of
"mass product customization," is to approach a career
path as a "lattice" rather than a "ladder,"
and to change from a "one-size-fits-all" to a "custom-made"
approach. The model changes from a one-dimensional model with
flexibility as the exception, and makes individually customized
careers the norm throughout the organization.
Deloitte
implemented a 120-participant MCC pilot in 2005 and continued
a year-long, second-round pilot with more than 300 participants-74%
of whom were men-in 2006. It estimates it costs an average
of $150,000 to replace a lost employee. To combat attrition and
reduce costs, they emphasize that the traditional fast-track career
path to partnership is not the only route to success. "We're
trying to get away from the notion that one size fits all,"
says Diane Davies, a principal at Deloitte's Los Angeles office.
Deloitte's
MCC model has four interdependent dimensions which it defines
as follows:
o Pace addresses how quickly an employee is slated to progress
to increasing levels of responsibility and authority. Progression
typically is signaled by formal promotion from one level to
the next. Pace is the dimension that most directly incorporates
the element of time.
o Workload addresses the quantity of work performed, typically
measured in units of hours or days per week, pay cycle, month
or even year.
o Location/Schedule combines where work gets done (location)
and when work gets done (schedule). Together, they define much
of the day-to-day experience of how work gets done.
o Role refers to the category of an employee's position, job
description and responsibilities. Role has to do with an employee's
position, job description, and responsibilities-including management
responsibilities-and work assignments, and ranges from individual
contributors to leaders of corporations. Thus, for example,
changing an employee's clients changes their role within the
organization.
Employers
and individual employees are expected to work together to alter
a job based on all four dimensions when changes occur either on
the employer's side or the employee's side.
"With
an MCC approach, corporations are not saying, I want only your
good years, or the years in which you can make a maximum contribution,"
says Myra Hart, a co-founder of Staples, Inc. and a Harvard Business
School faculty member. Instead, corporations are saying, "We'd
like a long-term contract with you. We know that some years you
will be giving more and some years you will be giving less. But
that's fine as long as we can plot this in a way that works and
makes sense for both of us. This is a very new approach to employee
retention."
Deloitte's
pilot programs were deemed successful. Among their successes,
Deloitte discovered that:
- Satisfaction
with career-life fit, morale and productivity all improved.
- Client
service standards were maintained and clients reacted very positively
to the program with some interested in implementing the program
within their own organization.
- Significant
savings were achieved and a positive correlation between retention
and MCC was identified, with 90% of participants stating that
MCC influenced their decision to stay with Deloitte.
- Employees
did not immediately ask to dial down their workload as initially
feared.
Together
with their successes, Deloitte also encountered several challenges
in implementing MCC, including "abandoning the notion that
nontraditional career paths are based on one-off exceptions."
To combat stigma, Deloitte recognizes that "MCC should be
integrated into various talent-management processes" on strategic
and tactical levels. Deloitte also learned that "consistency
doesn't necessarily mean sameness" and that "MCC will
evolve in different ways in each organization." Another lesson
was that employers need to "allow for movement in both directions
-dialing up or dialing down - along each dimension" and that
ways also need to be found that will also allow talented employees
to leave and return to the workplace. Finally, MCC requires a
significant amount of time and trust to implement and, because
"not all managers are good at listening and thinking in a
holistic sense with an employee about how best to integrate career,
work and life . . . , [m]anagers and employees need to be educated
about how to have these conversations."
Despite
these difficulties, Deloitte believes that "MCC has the power
to inspire greater employee productivity, reduce the costs of
turnover and generate greater loyalty through a collaborative
approach to designing careers." These are some of the successes
it has already begun enjoying and benefits that legal employers
can also reap by adopting an MCC framework and controlling for
any stigma often associated with a reduction in hours.
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