Customize Your Career

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Hello hello and welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Online. On today's program we talk with Kathleen Banko, author of Mass Career Aligning the Workplace with Today's Non Traditional Workforce. Hello, I'm Steve Singer and I'm on the phone today with Kathleen Banko, co author with Anne Weisberg of the new book Mass Career Aligning the Workplace with Today's Non Traditional Workforce. Welcome, Kathleen.

Thank you, Steve. Very happy to be here.

Kathleen, your book describes a framework for creating a new kind of workplace, one that responds to the evolving needs of the existing and upcoming workforce, no matter what their age or stage of their career. In fact, you seem to take a very cross generational approach to the development of your framework because you've discerned some trends that you feel affect all workers. Would you start off our discussion by talking about those six trends that you see converging on the workforce?

When we look around ourselves today, and we certainly know, very familiar to each one of us some of these trends, but I don't think we've ever noticed them in concert with each other and how in fact the resulting convergence really makes a difference. So let's just kind of quickly go through these. We all know about the shrinking pool of skilled labor, not just in this country, by the way, but many of the developed nations around the world. In the US alone, there will be a 6 million person gap in workers, and that's the supply of workers versus the demand for workers in the next few years alone. And it's expected to rise to 35 million over the next 15 years or so, you take that along with the change in the family structures in past generations. Certainly for many boomers and those earlier than boomers, the traditional family structure was the husband went off to work and the wife stayed home, raised the kids and was essentially the COO of the household, although she generally wasn't given that title. And if we look at family structures today, that model fits about 17% of US families. In past generations it was closer to 2/3. So huge shift in there. In addition to that, you have the increasing number of women in the workplace. In fact, women are the majority of the incoming labor pool. Women are the majority of undergraduate graduates, graduate school graduates, and are well in the 40% at even the PhD level. So you have a lot more women coming into the workplace. Yet it is still True today that women do not. About 50% of women do not work full time continuously throughout their career. They break somewhere along the way. Could be on average for two years or so. So some implications in that. And we take the shrinking pool and the change in the family structures and the increasing number of women, and we add to that the changing expectations of men, particularly boomer men. In fact, there was a recent study done where 84% of male executives said that in fact they would at this point trade off some of their career responsibilities and further progression to have more family time. And then if you go to the younger generations where it's pretty cross gender, they're saying very different things. They're saying, I want it all, I want to climb the corporate ladder, but I also want more time for my family, I want more time for personal pursuits, I want more time to give to my community. So I'm willing to take longer on the career front to achieve my overall goals and objectives, to be able to do it in a more balanced way.

One of the things that you talk about in the book is a tension between workers and the organizations that they work for. What do you think that tension is all about?

Most simplistically, the tensions are around the fact that the work place is pretty much the same in terms of its expectation around a continuous career. Over the number of years that you'll be working, the 40 or so years that you'll be in the corporate workforce, still pretty much full time, pretty much in the office. And yet if you look at this workforce, it has dramatically changed. And so we see a huge misalignment between today's workforce and the workplace that has not changed much since in fact, the beginning of the Industrial revolution.

And so that brought you to what you're suggesting as a new corporate strategy that you call mass career customization. What exactly is that strategy?

Well, you know, if we step back and we look at what's going on, organizations for the past 10 or 15 years have seen some of the misalignment, but they've dealt with it in terms of more kind of point solutions. And FWAs, as they're often called, or flexible work arrangements has been the response to date. You know, flexible work arrangements are, you know, kind of doing something one off. It's a point solution for an individual that can't seem to make the normal full time expectation of work for him or her at whatever point they are in their life. And so we create these basic workarounds. And there are some fundamental problems with the notion of workarounds because what you're really doing is reinforcing, in our opinion, a very outmoded, outdated norm, which is the expectation of continuous upward path and trajectory, as really illustrated through the corporate ladder model. We see a much more flexible model out there. Flexible in that it's more adaptive and it's more fluid.

Right. And you call that the corporate lattice.

Yes. We have dubbed what we see as the corporate ladder giving way to a corporate lattice model. And if you think about a lattice, it's got an upward growth and trajectory. We think that that certainly is a mainstay within corporate America, that there are more paths and there are more varied paths and there are different ways to move up within your career. And we think a lattice model, I mean, you know, you can. Lattice is actually a mathematical expression that is infinite in nature, an infinite number of possibilities. Now, we look at it a little bit differently and say it's a climbing wall. Or if you even go to the garden and you look the way ivy grows, or you look the way rose bushes grow, it's up a lattice. But it is not in a very singular step fashion. So when we look at this and we actually went to consumer products and we say, well, what are some of the trends going on there? And the trend is really around mass product customization. You can customize your jeans or your sneakers or your golf clubs or your US postage stamps. ITunes, in fact, is all about customized music. My favorite is M&MS. You can have custom colors, custom messages on your M&Ms. Today. You, in fact, can customize products in this manner in a very kind of tailored sense. Why couldn't you also customize careers?

It makes a real management challenge, though, doesn't it?

Management challenge. I guess I would challenge that. And I'll give you a couple of examples. Deloitte is very well known for its innovative workplace practices. And we have a couple of thousand people on flexible work arrangements and very mixed result. And we looked at the mixed result because, you know, even in our industry, somewhere close to 90% of people this is across our industry, leave for reasons of working conditions and work life issues. And when you have an industry that's really predicated on people, that's in effect, your product, and you take a look at what you've been doing today, which are flexible work arrangements, and you look at this and say, it's just not kind of coming together. We at Deloitte, we did a study, we had 69 flexible work programs available to our people. 69. And we clearly weren't meeting all of the needs of all of our people. But we in fact had a pop quiz for our board and for our executive committee and said, you know what? Can you name more than five of these 69 programs? And very difficult to do that. So we're saying we're not meeting the Mead with 69 programs. What do we need? 690 programs. But if in fact, you can't effectively communicate nearly that many programs to your people and math, maybe you're looking at it the wrong way. And so for us, it's actually in some respects easier because it's more tailored to the individual. It's in this notion, in this trend that's all over our environment towards kind of customizing experiences, customizing products, and in this case, customizing careers to meet the needs of the individual while still meeting the needs of the business.

So it seems like it's great for the worker, but it does seem like, I wonder about the value to the organization. Is it just retention?

Well, the benefit to the organization is fairly multidimensional. Does it help with retention? Absolutely. It helps with loyalty, it helps with satisfaction, which helps with productivity. It also helps attract more workers because it's a more adaptive model, it's a more progressive kind of workplace. If you take a look at what mass product customization delivered for consumer products, it was increased customer loyalty, it was decreased cost, and it was increased profitability, basically through value pricing. And what we argue on the mass career customization side is the benefits are actually the same. Increased employee satisfaction, increased loyalty, and decreased the cost of acquisition. Remember, in the US alone, Deloitte hired 12,000 people last year. And so those are some pretty big numbers. And so if you can increase the length of time that people stay with us, and if you could decrease the cycle time and cost and the like of talent acquisition, then that's a win for both the individual and the employer.

What other organizations have implemented the mass career customization?

You know, the way we look at it is this is a new framework, but in fact, we argue it's already going on and it has been going on for some time. And so the value proposition is much more around codifying, around structuring response, giving it a lexicon, you know, having a way that, you know, kind of a framework so that everybody is. Can use it very consistently in a very scalable way, which was actually, we argue, one of the issues around flexible work arrangements is that it is not easily scalable and there's not a lot of equity associated with it. So we're looking for a scalable equitable solution that works for our clients and works for us. But again, it's already going on informally. And the way it's been going on is sometimes in cooperation with your employer and sometimes not where you make individual decisions to, you know, kind of on the margin dial yourself back maybe in terms of your career trajectory and just kind of go on a slower path or dial down in terms of your workload or in fact even dial up where you're young and you're hungry or you're an empty nester and you want to give more to the organization. The way we're approaching it is to just say, hey, you can do it all within one model. Nothing to be spooked about because it's already going on. Some of the leading companies that are informally moving have been in an MCC Mass career customization model are people like Ogilvy and Mather, people like SAS in the tech field, people like Arnold and Porter. From within the law profession are some examples that we cite. Companies that have been living a lattice like thinking for some time.

Well, this has been great. Kathleen. Thank you very much for your time this morning.

It's a pleasure to spend some time with you, Steven.

We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. To learn more on these and other management topics, please visit our website at www.harvardbusinessonline.org. thanks for listening and be sure to join us again next week.