Career Customization for Everyone: Deloitte’s Career/Life Program
36551Career Customization for Everyone: Deloitte’s Career/Life Program
“‘Deloitte’ is the brand under which tens of thousands of dedicated professionals in independent firms throughout the world collaborate to provide audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management and tax services to selected clients. These firms are members of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL), a UK private company limited by guarantee.”[i]
Like any other company, Deloitte seeks to be productive, to be profitable, and to grow¾in short, to succeed. For Deloitte to succeed, it must retain talented employees; however, retaining these employees has become increasingly challenging given the nature of traditional career paths in public accounting.
For many decades, employees of public accounting firms traditionally followed rather predictable career paths. However, those predictable career paths are changing, and alternative career paths are becoming increasingly common. Cheryl Leitschuh, president of Leitschuh Leadership Consulting in Minneapolis, says, “I don’t think there’s any official definition, but anything that falls out of the 80-hours-a-week, face-time traditional career model, which is the paradigm that has brought the profession to where it is, is considered an alternative career path.”[ii] In considering what younger people want in their careers, Anne Weisberg, Deloitte’s director of talent diversity, asserts that “you can’t assume that the way you manage your career is going to work for generations behind you. So don’t overlay your experiences on them and expect them to fall into the way you did things.”[iii] Some of the career features that Deloitte’s younger employees seek in these alternative career paths include “long-term career development, multiple experiences within a single company, flexibility, a sense of purpose, respect and open communication.”[iv]
In 2005, Deloitte LLP began experimenting with changes to the traditional employer-employee relationship in order to retain more of their well-educated, carefully recruited, high-potential mid-career employees. The experimental program, known as Mass Career Customization (MCC) “was born out of Deloitte’s own need to address attrition” and “to keep high performers.”[v] Based on an analysis of employee exit-survey data, Cathy Benko, Deloitte’s chief talent officer, and her team discovered that lack of flexibility was the number one reason women gave for leaving the company, and the number two reason that men provided for leaving.[vi] Yet, according to Benko, Deloitte had 69 different types of flexible work arrangements¾ranging from telecommuting to compressed workweeks¾“and people were still leaving because of [the] lack of flexibility.”[vii]
Mass Career Customization was designed to provide all of Deloitte’s employees¾not just its superstars¾with opportunities to have the flexibility they wanted and needed in their careers. MCC enables employees to better manage their careers in relation to changing work/life issues.[viii] MCC focuses on how employees want their careers to unfold, which also helps to foster greater employee loyalty to the firm.[ix]
Under the MCC program, “[e]mployees periodically fill out a profile detailing whether they want to stay on their current course, ‘dial up’ by taking on more projects and responsibility, or ‘dial down,’ reducing their hours or amount of travel, for example.”[x] MCC “allows people to ‘dial up’ or ‘dial down,’ depending on life circumstances, whether they’re fresh out of school or a harried new parent. For the latter, this can mean putting in fewer hours or passing on travel or new projects, without hurting the chance of promotion in the future.”[xi]
As a starting point for career planning, each employee receives a default profile that reflects the employees’ current career situation. The MCC default profile contains four career dimensions that can be dialed up or dialed down as employees’ progress through their careers and face changing life circumstances.[xii] The career dimensions are: (1) pace of career (the rate of career progression); (2) workload (the quantity of work output); (3) location/schedule (when and where the work is performed); and (4) role (the employee’s position and responsibilities within the firm.[xiii]
Dialing down can mean cutting back work hours or work load or even working from home.[xiv] Dialing up means that employees will take on added responsibilities so they can gain a broader and richer set of work experiences. Although dialing up is not a promotion, it does make an employee more marketable.[xv] However, “[j]ust because employees ask to dial up or dial down doesn’t mean that they will be approved by their managers.” [xvi] David Rosenblum, a Los Angeles-based partner in Deloitte’s consulting practice, indicates that dial up requests can be more challenging than dial down requests. According to Rosenblum, employees’ experiences can’t be accelerated when they need to do certain things before they move to the next level.[xvii]
According to Cathy Benko, the program was rolled out to 80 percent of employees in the company’s U.S. offices by the end of 2009.[xviii] Of those employees choosing to avail themselves of the non-traditional career path afforded by MCC, about two-thirds dial up their careers and about one-third dial down their careers.[xix] Moreover, men are as likely as women to dial-up or dial-down their careers.[xx] The MCC program seems to be resonating with employees as indicated by improvements in employee satisfaction with ‘overall career/life fit’ and retention of high-performing employees.[xxi] With its record of success with the MCC program, Deloitte now is trying to make believers of its clients.[xxii]
Discussion Questions
1. Explain the basic nature of Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization (MCC) program.
2. Explain how Deloitte’s MCC program can help employees in managing their careers and in dealing with work/life issues.
3. What are the benefits of MCC for Deloitte and its employees?
4. Would Deloitte’s MCC program be easily adapted in other companies? Why or why not?
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