Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg foresee a collision between the traditional rigid corporate ladder that characterizes the organization of most workplaces and an emerging nontraditional workforce. The new workforce is characterized by several converging trends. The approaching retirement of the baby boomers, combined with lower birthrates, stagnant college graduation rates, and declining competence in basic writing and math skills, results in a shrinking pool of skilled labor. The marriage rate is declining, and more of those who are married are in dual-career households. There are more single-parent families who have, in common with dual-career parents, less of a support structure for responsibilities outside of work.
Women now make up half the workforce and more than half of college graduates. Women are also making better grades and winning more honors in college than men. Women's childbearing years often coincide with the key middle years of their careers, and women who leave the workforce temporarily find it difficult to reenter later. Women who do reach management levels are more likely than men to be in dual-career households and to feel the strain more.
Men now also expect to spend more time with their families. Formerly, men's latent demand for flexibility was suppressed by traditional expectations of what a man's role in business and family should be. Both male and female members of Generations X and Y, however, now place a higher priority on a meaningful family life and are less willing to sacrifice it for their career. At the same time, technology is making possible new virtual workplaces that offer more flexibility as to where and how work is done.
These trends are driving new employee demands for flexibility in the workplace while technology is creating new ways to accommodate them. Employers will have to meet these demands to attract the workers they will need, and that will mean moving away from the rigid corporate ladder to a more flexible lattice model that allows for multiple career paths.
The flexible work arrangements many employers now offer are not the answer. Too often, they are static, one-off solutions to an employee's particular, temporary needs. They are seen as exceptions to the norm of full-time work that do not address the conflict between rigid career paths and varying employee needs. Employees who take advantage of flexible arrangements are stigmatized as less committed. Managers and leaders find it difficult to create flexible arrangements for themselves. Granting flexible arrangements to some employees may raise equity issues and lead to resentment among others who are asked to take up the slack. Trade-offs, particularly in compensation and advancement, are often not discussed.
Benko and Weisberg propose "mass career customization (MCC)" as a means of systematizing and embedding the needed flexibility in the structure of the workplace and extending it to most employees. "MCC assumes a definite, not infinite, set of options along four career dimensions and provides a structure to articulate and manage these options as commonplace events—rather than one-off accommodations. Employees customize their careers by selecting the option within each of these four dimensions that most closely matches their career objectives while considering their life circumstances and the needs of the business at any point in time. Decisions on each option are made in counsel with managers and revisited periodically. These choices are registered on an MCC profile. ..." (pp. 82-83) Every employee, apart from, perhaps, part-timers and new hires, will have a profile. At any given time, most profiles in an organization will reflect a full-time, unrestricted work schedule, but each employee's profile will vary over time, reflecting a reduced commitment to cope with childbearing, child rearing, or other life events and then a return to fully engaged work.
The four dimensions of MCC, each of which varies along a scale, are, with their endpoints: Pace (accelerated or decelerated), Workload (full or reduced), Location/Schedule (unrestricted or restricted), and Role (leader or individual contributor). Pace refers to how quickly the employee advances to higher levels of authority; Workload, to the quantity of work performed, expressed as number of hours worked per day or week. An unrestricted Location/Schedule corresponds to full-time work and unlimited availability for travel. Role refers to the category of the employee's position or job responsibilities. The dimensions are interrelated, making trade-offs explicit. For example, a restricted Location/Schedule requires a reduced Workload and probably also a decelerated Pace. A management Role may require an unrestricted Location/Schedule, while an individual contributor Role may be compatible with a restricted Location/Schedule. These variations would also impact compensation, although not evaluations, which should relate to each employee's goals as specified in his or her MCC profile.
The benefits of MCC include promoting an ongoing conversation between the employer and the employee and providing a framework for discussing career options. For employers, benefits include an improved ability to forecast talent needs, a tool to attract and retain high-performing employees and to "entice aging talent to extend their tenure ..." (p. 152) by offering them a reduced commitment. MCC promotes leadership diversity by providing multiple and flexible career paths. In particular, MCC allows talented women to stay connected to the organization through their child-rearing years and rise to top positions.
Reconfiguring the workspace for MCC may involve separating jobs into modules. Employees would take on more or fewer modules as their MCC profiles changed. Virtual networks offer more flexibility in when and where work is done.
Building the business case for MCC involves estimating how scarce critical talent is now and how scarce it will be in the future, and asking who is leaving your organization and why. (p. 152) Are they leaving for other jobs or to cope with life events? How much does it cost to replace them, and when does the cost affect the bottom line? How many one-off flexible arrangements are your managers handling now? These are not isolated incidents but a trend that requires a comprehensive response.
This book was published in 2007, before the current financial crisis became evident. It may seem that the crisis has, at least temporarily, put an end to the talent shortage and therefore to the need to offer incentives such as MCC to attract employees. This may indeed be a long-term change. On the other hand, as the workforce trends cited by Benko and Weisberg are mostly long-term demographic trends that will not be reversed (e.g., the retirement of the baby boomers and lower birthrates have already guaranteed that succeeding generations will be smaller), it may very well be that, as the economy recovers, the talent shortage will return, and with it the need to adapt to the changing workforce.
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