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 employ-ees.* 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 accom-
modations 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 em-
Cathleen Benko
ployee’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
