Sweeping changes in the way we work, live, and build careers are not just on the horizon - - they are here to stay. Rather than climbing the "one-size-fits-all" corporate ladder, today's knowledge workers are continually tailoring their careers by moving in and out of organizations and up and down hierarchies, albeit often without support or structure from their employers.

While all this movement can be interpreted as a lack of loyalty, we believe its underpinnings are rooted in a set of converging workforce trends that are redefining today's workforce, one that is diverse in background, personal circumstances, expectations, and aspirations.

  • Shrinking pool of skilled labor. This is resulting in a 6 million person gap between supply and demand of knowledge workers by 2012.
  • Changing family structures. Only 17 percent of households have only one spouse in the workforce, down from two-thirds in past generations.
  • Increasing number of educated women. Nearly 60 percent of bachelor's and master's degrees are awarded to women.
  • Changing expectations of men. Eighty-four percent of male executives would like to realize professional aspirations and have more personal time.
  • Evolving expectations of generations X and Y. Baby boomers are twice as likely as Gen X and Gen Y to be work-centric.
  • Increasing impact of technology. With 76 percent of U.S. households with broadband, communications are ubiquitous.

Each of these trends is powerful in its own right. But they are converging, and that convergence is pushing a fundamental paradigm shift that is replacing the outdated, corporate ladder model of career progression with a new model: the corporate lattice.

In mathematics, a lattice allows one to move in many directions, is not limited to upward or downward progress, and can combe repeated infinitely at any scale. In the real world, lattices are living platforms for growth, with upward momentum visible along many paths.

Building a corporate lattice organization requires a new mental model of career progression and a supporting framework, approach, and set of processes that identify, develop, and advance talent in ways that go well beyond the one-off marginal systems of flexible work arrangements. We've created a framework called mass career customization (MCC) that reflects the reality of today's workforce and provides a structured approach for organizations and their people to identify options, make choices, and agree on trade-offs to ensure that value is created for both the business and for the individual.

Mass Customization is All Around

We are increasingly familiar with products in our daily lives - from ring tones to stamps to credit card billing cycles to M&Ms - that enable us to customize various features to our tastes and wants. According to the Production Planning & Control article "Does Mass Customization Pay? An Economic Approach to Evaluate Customer Integration," replacing one-size-fits-all products with an array of customized product offerings, mass product customization has resulted in lower costs, higher profit margins, and strengthened brand loyalty.

These benefits are readily transferable to MCC. If you can customize your candy, music, sneakers, and coffee, why not your career? MCC does this by supporting multiple career paths, each designed and executed through continuous collaboration between employer and employee. MCC delivers competitive advantage through increased productivity through greater satisfaction and career-life fit, decreased acquisition and retention costs, and increased loyalty from greater connection with employees.

Core Characteristics of MCC

MCC is centered on the view that increasingly the career journey of many employees in knowledge-driven organizations will look like a sine wave of sorts with climbing and falling phases. MCC addresses this reality by replacing the norm of continuous full-time employment up the ladder with a set of variable paths.

MCC defines a set of options along four career dimensions - pace, workload, location orschedule, and role - and provides a structure to articulate and manage these options as commonplace events rather than as on-off accommodations. In collaboration with their managers, employees customize their careers by periodically selecting options along each dimension based on their career objectives and current life circumstances within the context of the needs of the business.

Option Value is Greater Than Options Taken

Although MCC provides options for multiple career paths, it does not open the door to an infinite number of profiles. On the contrary, at any time a majority of employees will have profiles. The profiles are common in that they look the same as many others; however, they are tailored because each represents an individual's choices at any particular time. Deloitte has rolled out MCC to approximately 7,500 individuals, with plans to roll it out to the entire organization over the next year: More than 90 percent have selected a common profile.

However, studies show that employees who believe they have greater control over career options and enjoy organizational support for their decisions are happier, more loyal, and more productive. So, even if they don't currently need options, employees receive a psychic benefit from knowing that real options and an organizational process for managing them are available should they need to deviate from standard,

full-time employment some time in the future.

There is a cultural value that MCC delivers as well by requiring well-framed conversations between employee and employer regarding career choices. The transparency

and shared responsibility for career planning that result from these structured conversations are integral features of a lattice organization.

Not an Island

The MCC dimensions and their interplay are core parts of the MCC framework, but the framework is not static - nor is it meant to operate in isolation. Rather, the framework is meant to function within an organization's overarching talent management systems and processes, including roles and responsibilities; scheduling and deployment; goal setting; career planning; professional training and development; succession planning; performance evaluation; and compensation and benefits.

Organizational adoption and mutual reinforcement are several primary reasons for embedding or in other ways connecting the MCC framework to your existing talent management systems and cycles. Additional reasons are to:

  • provide immediate scale capability
  • bring career planning to the forefront, making it an intentional rather than a haphazard discussion
  • facilitate tracking of MCC's impact on talent management
  • provide managers and employees with guardrails that define option boundaries and shared business objectives
  • create a lexicon for one-on-one conversations between manager and employee, and for informal discussions within teams and departments, and across the organization
  • encourage greater transparency regarding career decisions across teams and between the employer and employee.

We recognize that adding the MCC framework to talent management processes is not a simple matter, but our experience is that doing so is mutually reinforcing; makes for more robust discussions; and ultimately improves the efficacy of these processes.

Benefits of MCC

For employees, MCC provides options and a process for making choices among these options at points in time and over time. Employees derive a psychic benefit from having greater control over setting priorities and managing their careers, and as a result, are more satisfied, productive, and loyal. Because MCC is applicable to everyone, customized career paths become the "new normal" for career progression within lattice organizations.

For employers, MCC is a tool for attracting and retaining valued employees. MCC promotes transparency and over time can transform the relationship between employer and employee, allowing companies to more accurately forecast their human capital resources, reduce costs, improve succession planning, and more efficiently target growth opportunities.

Given these business benefits, Deloitte LLP has been on a journey to adopt MCC since 2005, by first piloting the concept over a two-year period and then rolling out MCC to 20 percent of its U.S. workforce in 2007, with plans to roll out MCC to the remainder of the U.S. workforce in 2008. Participants have reported an increase in satisfaction and productivity, stating that the MCC framework helped them better manage work, career, and personal life.

There also has been a substantial improvement in the quality of career conversations. "The counseling sessions I have held using the MCC framework were clearly more productive. My counselees came prepared to talk about how their profiles look today and what their profiles might look like in the future. They appreciated the transparency," says Mike Pacetti, a partner with Deloitte and Touche LLP. "My counselees talked openly about career-life fit. There was a real acknowledgment of the need to be able to customize careers."

In addition, MCC has had a positive impact on intent-to-stay scores, indicating that loyalty is growing. It is clear that there is psychic value in knowing a model exists that can be tailored to evolving life circumstances - regardless of whether these options are ever exercised.

There was a significant concern that moving to an MCC model would open the floodgates for decelerating careers. Interestingly, however, across the pilots and throughout the subsequent roll-out phase, a majority of employees initially elected not to change the level of their career progression - either through dialing up or down - their level of engagement with the organization. Their MCC profiles are a visual representation of their current levels of overall company contributions. Also of note is in those relatively few cases where individuals wanted to adjust their level of contribution, the interest in accelerating careers outpaced interest in decelerating by at least two to one.

Even with these initial positive results, implementing MCC has had its challenges. One challenge has been integrating MCC into existing talent management processes and systems. Articulating the impact of different choices available under the MCC framework on compensation, goal setting, and performance reviews and ratings required some attention. At the same time, managers needed to take action to integrate new information about their employees' plans and desires into how their teams are structured and work is delivered. There was also variability in their willingness and ability to do so just as there is variability in managers' counseling abilities.

Adoption of mass career customization as the framework to enable the corporate lattice organization to take root is, in many respects, acknowledgement that the organization is at an inflection point relative to how it views and manages its talent. Leading your organization to adopt MCC - in spirit or in form - will require a solid understanding of and buy-in to the urgency of the realities of the talent market, as well as articulated business benefits of embracing the lattice paradigm.

Many companies have learned that personalizing the customer experience is good for business. Mass product customization exploits new communications and manufacturing technologies to increase profit margins and customer satisfaction, build loyalty, and strengthen long-term brand affinity. MCC provides a similar set of benefits. MCC inspires increased employee productivity, reduces the cost of turnover, generates greater loyalty, and enables the organization's most valuable assets - its people - to accomplish the organization's most important work and purpose.