Excerpt: Mass Career Customization

MCC provides a structure, systematic approach, and corporate lexicon that allows organizations to correlate employees' talents, career aspirations, and evolving life circumstances over time in ways that match up with the enterprise's evolving marketplace strategies and commensurate need for talent. Equally important, MCC recognizes, validates, and embraces the changing tempos of today's knowledge workers, offering a scalable solution to the enervating dilemmas in their search for work-life integration.

In this way, MCC does for careers what mass product customization (MPC) has done for the consumer products industry: replace a one-size-fits-all approach with a bevy of customized product offerings.

The New Workforce Imperative
The traditional, one-size-fits-all, continuously full-time model of career progression represented by the corporate ladder no longer fits the needs of the nontraditional workforce. This career model is already evolving toward a more adaptive model that we term the corporate lattice.

In mathematics, a lattice 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.

Why Here and Why Now
So why is now the time to acknowledge, even accelerate, the transformation of the corporate structure from ladder to lattice? One reason is the growing strategic significance of sweeping dislocations in workforce composition, attitudes, and capabilities presented by the convergence of six key trends. Although some of these trends have been observable for decades, their momentum is accelerating and compounding in part because other offsetting factors, such as high immigration rates, are now waning.

We have reached an inflection point for managing the enterprise workplace. The time has come for these antiquated standards to change.

Mass Career Customization:
The Emerging Standard
MCC presents a structured response to the demise of the corporate ladder and provides a transparent, scalable framework for customizing careers within the corporate lattice.The MCC framework is the emerging standard for aligning current and future career development options for the employee with current and future requirements of the business in ways that are sustainable for both, moving the relationship between employer and employee toward more transparent, continuous collaboration.

Drawing on the success of mass product customization for inspiration, MCC delivers distinct competitive advantage.

As consumers, we have gotten very used to expecting manufacturers and retailers to customize all sorts of things in our daily lives—personal computers, denim jeans, sneakers, credit card billing cycles, and so on. MCC extends this popular and profitable concept of defined choices in the consumer marketplace to the workplace. The principles of MCC include:

• Increasing choices that help employees shape career paths that fit the various stages of their personal lives
• Making career building a more explicitly shared responsibility between the enterprise and the individual
• Making adaptability over time a core competency for individuals and enterprises
• Creating transparency regarding trade-offs and choices that leads to better planning, better decisions, and greater satisfaction
• Selecting choices that are good for both the employee and the enterprise
• Retaining talent by cultivating a new sense of loyalty and connection.

Our initial experiences in putting the framework and processes of MCC into action strongly suggest that this approach is far more appealing than the most common benefit now available to accommodate circumstances in employees' family and personal lives, the flexible work arrangement (FWA).

Flexible Work Arrangements:
Admirable—But Not The Answer
In the 1980s, many companies introduced policies such as maternity leave and flexible schedules in response to employee demand for options to address childcare and other responsibilities. In the 1990s, formal FWAs were adopted more widely as companies increasingly recognized their importance for recruiting and retaining high-performing employees.* Yet work-life fit continues to be a primary concern for women and men.** Though many companies have offered FWAs in various forms for the last 10 years or more, the evidence is clear that this benefit has not succeeded in helping employers retain vast numbers of workers. FWAs are accommodations to an outmoded workplace standard and have significant limitations because they typically:

• Are point solutions addressing only the hours and location of work at a specific time in an employee's work life
• Are often negotiated on a one-off basis, and not integrated into the long-term planning for an employee's career progression
• Are often limited to lower-level staff positions, which are far fewer in number than the line positions where most business activities are directly transacted
• Do not anticipate changing family and personal commitments—increasing and decreasing―outside of work throughout a career, and
• Do not include longer-term planning for an employee's career progression in roles, quality of assignments and pace for promotions, and increasing responsibilities.

Creating the New Normal
Mass career customization provides both scalability and
policy boundaries, as well as the transparency and consistency lacking in FWAs. MCC is a natural evolution from the traditional corporate-ladder path, with its one-size-fits-all approach, and the one-off FWA approach of accommodation through point solutions.

MCC assumes a definite, not infinite, set of options along four career dimensions—Pace, Workload, Location/Schedule, and Role—and provides a structure to manage these options as commonplace events. Employees customize their careers by periodically selecting, in counsel with their managers, the option that best fits their career objectives and life circumstances at the time (e.g., wanting to start a family, pursue educational opportunities, or attain a professional goal more swiftly than normal). An MCC profile provides a snapshot of an employee's career and helps clarify expectations for contributions, evaluations, and rewards, and can be adjusted over time to reflect changing circumstances.

It's Already Going On
Elements of informal MCC are happening all around us, albeit in varieties of one-off manifestations. Many people have managed their career-life fit by making MCC-type choices, though without the structure and support of the MCC framework.

These choices range from turning down a promotion (Pace) to care for an elderly parent to reducing the number of hours worked each week (Workload) to fit with childcare responsibilities. Some, particularly women, have stepped out of the workforce completely, while others have moved from one organization to another, searching for that elusive career-life fit. Many cases of informal MCC appear at first to be unusually well-managed sequences of FWAs. In retrospect, however, they turn out to be seat-of-the-pants progressions that happened to work out well. Relatively few individuals are able to navigate multiple steps off and back on either a career ladder or informal lattice over several to many years.

The example of one employee, Tina, is a good illustration of how informal MCC occurs in many enterprises. Tina's case is typical in marking a progression of one-off FWA negotiations that happened to work out well and, indeed, includes several features of the MCC framework. That said, it is a look back through the rear-view mirror of a best-case FWA scenario, not an illustration of the road we envision ahead.

Think of Tina's career journey as a pseudo-sine wave with rising and falling phases along a baseline, which over time rises steadily as she advances in her personally calibrated blend of career and family life. This process negotiated and navigated by Tina and her supervisors over more than a decade enabled Tina to expand her professional skills and experience at a pace that meshed with her family priorities. She also established a foundation for 30 years or more of future professional growth and rewards.

Managing Trade-Offs
We know that some executives and managers will have serious doubts about implementing MCC. Won't everyone opt for part-time schedules or no-travel provisions? How will we meet our business needs? A series of MCC pilot programs proves these fears to be off the mark. Many participants, especially younger employees, were interested in dialing up, to advance further and faster. The results underscored the importance of understanding the interdependence and trade-offs between career dimensions and making these part of discussions between supervisors and employees.

The Option Value of MCC
With the MCC framework, employees collaborate with their employers to create real options—whether or not they ever take advantage of these options. Knowing they have options and seeing others pursuing their own objectives is a strong inducement for employees to stay in a continuous relationship with their employer—and for sought-after recruits to sign on. We believe countless high-performing, high-potential employees who opted out or in other ways underperformed relative to their potential could have been retained and engaged if the customized career option had been visible and viable.

Solving the misalignment between the workplace and the new realities of today's nontraditional workforce is an urgent priority for all C-level executives. The corporate-lattice organization, grounded in the MCC framework, is a comprehensive solution, delivering both immediate options and far-sighted planning for employees. For the enterprise, improving employee retention leads to significant savings in the HR and operational budgets. A high rate of employee retention is also fundamental for improving customer service, customer retention and, ultimately, revenues, as well as achieving growth projections.

Solving the "my life doesn't fit into my work and my work doesn't fit into my life" conundrum is a lofty goal for both employer and employee. MCC offers a compelling answer that does just that.

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