Mass Career Customization

We all know that the way so many organisations – not least professional services organisations – are set up does not quite seem to make sense.  Partners seem to demand long hours of work from junior colleagues, involving frequent travel and much time spent away from home.  Many years of slog are seen as necessary to reach the illustrious top of the career ladder.

But when employers look around their company today, what do they see?  A lot of unhappy, stressed people, many of whom seem only too keen to leave.  We are supposed to be in a ‘war for talent’, but in this war bosses have turned their guns on their own people.  The ranks are being decimated.  This does not look like a sustainable, or sensible, way to run a business.

Of course, some enlightened companies have been talking about ‘work-life balance’, and trying to offer greater flexibility for many years.  The trouble is, the results have been mixed.  As Cathleen Benko and Anne Weissberg, two senior Deloitte executives, write in their new book: ‘Despite a workforce that is clamouring for more flexibility, there is mounting evidence that flexible work arrangements [FWAs] are not the answer for retaining top performers and developing long-term relationships between employers and employees.  There is one overarching reason fro this: FWAs are point solutions often expressed as one-off accommodations or exceptions; neither are they adequately integrated with the organisation’s ongoing talent management processes, not do they address the larger question of how an individual’s career unfolds over time.  In short, FWAs lack connection with the construct of careers.’

As an alternative, our authors recommend something altogether more radical: a whole company solution, which they refer to as ‘mass career customisation’ [MCC].  In plain terms, MCC means allowing each employee to plan a relevant and attractive career path.  We should stop thinking in terms of the career ladder, they say, and instead consider the more subtle image of a corporate lattice – a phrase, incidentally, that appears with a TM beside it in the book, just so as you know.

A lattice (TM!) better represents the discontinuous career path that is the reality for many people today.  We leave firms, go back to them, plateau for a while, then (we hope) make a big leap up, then maybe choose to take a step back again.  All these moves, of course, should really be planned and discussed with our employers.

The authors say that four main career dimensions have to be considered to make mass customisation work: pace, workload, location/schedule and role.  Each dimension is interdependent.

What should we make of this new MCC approach?  Could it work in practice?  Certainly, there are some employers that are getting nearer to a more sophisticated grasp of their employees’ reasonable career aspirations, trying to help them.  SAS, the technology firm, and (naturally) Deloitte, are cited as leading examples.

But will we see anytime soon a mass conversion to MCC approaches from big employers?  You have to doubt it.  The ad hoc, one-off accommodations will continue to be the norm at most companies.  Until, that is, there is no one left who actually wants to work for them.