Building the Corporate Lattice Organization Through
Mass Career Customization
by Cathy Benko & Anne Weisberg

[Editor's note: This is a follow-up to the article "Mass Career Customization." This article references the terms Corporate Lattice and Mass Career Customization, both of which are trademarks of Deloitte Development LLC and Mass Career Customization is a patent pending process owned by Deloitte Development LLC]

The corporate ladder has been the enduring gold standard for personal success since organizational hierarchy was invented. But the ladder model of career progression is fitting fewer and fewer. Women’s career paths, in particular, often look less like a straight climb up and more like an undulating journey filled with ascents, lateral moves and planned descents.

Take Sarah for example. Today, she leads a major practice group for a large consulting firm and travels around the country. But, it wasn’t always this way. She started out at a small consulting firm, and then moved into industry while her daughter was young.  When she returned to consulting, she limited her clients to local companies to meet her career-life fit needs. Now, as an empty nester, she has dialed up in her career and travels the world for business.

Sarah isn’t alone – many of us have tailored our careers to fit our changing personal needs. While women have been the ‘canaries in the corporate coal mines’ in this regard, the reality is that the workplace norms of how careers are built no longer fit the needs of today’s workforce. In an effort to better align the needs of the workforce and workplace, and in the process become a more inclusive environment for all knowledge workers across backgrounds, gender, age, ethnicity and the like, Deloitte LLP is evolving to a new model we’ve dubbed the corporate lattice.

In mathematics, a lattice allows one to move in many directions, is not limited to upward or downward progress, and can be repeated infinitely at any scale. In the real world, lattices are living platforms for growth with upward momentum visible along varying paths. The lattice model of career progression and talent development allows for multiple paths upward taking into account the changing needs of both the individual and the organization across intervals of time and career stages.

Six Trends* Converging to Create the Urgency for Change

Six key workforce trends are converging to create the need for organizations to accelerate the transition to the corporate lattice:

• Shrinking pool of skilled labor: A 6 million person gap between supply and demand of knowledge workers by 2012 growing to 35 million by 2025 is forecasted. Even a temporary slowdown in the economy will not significantly affect these longer-term trends.
• Changing family structures: Only 17% of households have a spouse in the workforce and one who is not, down from two-thirds in past generations. These “nontraditional” (in economic terms)  families are putting pressure on existing workplace models that were originally structured to match mainstream rhythms of the traditional two-parent, single income household of the past.
• Increasing number of women: Today nearly 60% of bachelor’s and master’s degrees are awarded to women and more than half of all management jobs are held by women. The majority of women, however, have nonlinear or discontinuous careers which are not supported by today’s workplace norms.
• Changing expectations of men: Nearly 85% of male executives would like to realize both professional aspirations and 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.  Members of these younger generations view careers as personalized paths that fit their individual interests, development goals and desire for many diverse experiences.
• Increasing impact of technology:  76% of U.S. households are equipped with broadband, making the availability and accessibility of communications ubiquitous.

Mass Career Customization Framework

The corporate lattice is the central idea behind Mass Career Customization (MCC). MCC, an enabler of a thriving corporate-lattice culture, offers a customized model for building careers and developing talent. The MCC framework articulates a definite, not infinite, set of options along four inter-related career dimensions– Pace, Workload, Location/Schedule, and Role – and provides a structure to articulate and manage these options as commonplace events rather than as one-off accommodations. 

Similar to the way sliders are moved up and down to adjust the sounds on a stereo equalizer, MCC allows employees to dial up and down along four career dimensions to optimize their career-life fit at varying life stages. Individuals are already customizing career paths through a variety of one-off decisions they are making – with or without structure or support from their employers. The results of these decisions are career paths that look like sine waves of sorts, with climbing and falling phases of engagement over time.

We encourage you to plot your own sine wave using the interactive exercise at www.masscareercustomization.com/interactive.html.  We’re confident that you will find you indeed have managed your own career-life fit by making MCC-like choices, though without the structure or support of the MCC framework.   

Implementing MCC: Learnings from the Front Lines

MCC is not an abstract theory. Having determined the need to evolve into a corporate lattice organization, Deloitte LLP began piloting MCC in 2005 and phased rollouts within its U.S. workforce are well-underway.

Key findings include:

• No negative impact on client service
• More consistent and robust career conversations are taking place
• Improved satisfaction is contagious
• A positive correlation between MCC and retention is established
• Employee referrals are a measure of efficacy
• The floodgates for reduced schedules  (“dial-downs”) did not materialize
• Increased window into those who want to accelerate growth (“dial-ups”)
• MCC is scalable
• Leadership support is a priceless enabler
• Integrating MCC with performance management is the ‘moment of truth’

Solving the misalignment between the workplace and the new realities of today’s nontraditional workforce is an urgent priority for all executives. The lattice organization, enabled by the MCC framework, fosters this alignment by continuously correlating employees’ talents, career aspirations, and evolving life circumstances with the enterprise’s evolving marketplace strategies and commensurate need for talent.  In so doing MCC recognizes, validates, and embraces the changing tempos of today’s knowledge workers, and offers a scalable solution to the “my life doesn’t fit into my work and my work doesn’t fit into my life” conundrum once and for all.

Connections magazine welcomes our featured contributors

Cathy Benko

Anne Weisberg

Read the first article in this series from Cathy & Anne:

Mass Career Customization
Aligning the Workplace with the Nontraditional Workforce