Business Insight Zone

My friend John Johansen pointed me to this Deloitte Review article, which has all kinds of food for thought if you’re concerned about attracting and retaining talented people for your organization:

Mass Career Customization: Building the Corporate Lattice Organization

The article’s authors, Cathy Benko and Anne Weisberg, are top executives in Deloitte‘s talent organization. (They’ve also written a book called Mass Career Customization, which I haven’t read.) This passage, especially the part I’ve bolded, captures the thrust of the article:

[W]e believe responding to the war for talent in the coming years will require a restructuring of both the expectations and the mechanics of how careers are built. In this article, we propose a new model for doing both we call mass career customization (MCC). MCC is based on our view that the career journey of knowledge workers increasingly looks like sine waves of sorts, with climbing and falling levels of engagement with work over time.

In fact, we see the corporate ladder model for career progression already giving way to what we term the corporate lattice. In mathematics, a lattice ladder allows one to move in many directions, is not limited to upward or downward progress, and can be repeated infinitely at any scale. In the real world, lattices are living platforms for growth, with upward momentum visible along many paths. The corporate lattice model of career progression allows for multiple paths upward taking into account the changing needs of both the individual and the organization across various intervals of time. It can foster transparency and shared responsibility for career planning, which in turn can drive a new brand of loyalty, based on the continuous collaboration between employer and employee to design customized career paths.

At least from reading just this article, MCC sounds like it pursues the same goals as the Results-Only Work Environment. The point, in each case, is to strengthen companies AND improve individuals’ working lives by moving away from traditional workplace norms and toward flexible arrangements that reflect today’s conceptions of work/life balance.

The coming talent crunch

The authors identify several macro-scale trends — including imminent mass retirement among Baby Boomers, and the career expectations of Gen X and Gen Y workers — as driving the need for this kind of innovative thinking. In years to come, ever more employees are likely to want the flexibility to dial up or dial down the intensity of their careers at certain times, for example when they have young children at home.

As they have rolled out MCC for Deloitte’s own workforce, the authors have found that the program has psychic benefits even for those workers who don’t choose to make changes in their working arrangements. Benko and Weisberg say that this can promote loyalty among workers because more of them feel comfortable staying with an organization that has such thoughtful, flexible practices.

If you have reactions to the piece, I’d be glad to hear them. My hunch is that smart companies will continue to embrace new practices like MCC — not for a surface-level feel-good effect, but because they see the strategic advantages that go hand-in-hand with satisfied employees.

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Related links:

• Benko and Weisberg’s site: Mass Career Customization
• Book Review: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It
• One big workflow.

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Category: Management,The working life