Work-Life Sanity Blog

Would you like to take a look at one company’s bold and effective response to employees’ changing needs for flexibility over the course of a working lifetime?  I have a fascinating book to recommend: Mass Career Customization, by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg. 

Benko and Weisberg write about how their company, Deloitte, has implemented a very new approach to flex.   

Deloitte has long been a standout leader in creating policies and practices that accommodate people’s needs for myriad forms of flexible work.  They started down this path many years ago as a means of stemming their costly turnover rates, particularly for their most talented women.  They were losing highly talented women from the partnership track at an alarming rate, mostly during the years when these women had young children.    Deloitte became the poster child company for family-friendly policies, and they reaped phenomenal savings in dollars and morale by dramatically increasing retention across the board. 

Now they’re taking it to the next level by implementing a broad system of customizing employees’ schedules and workloads a year at a time, based on the employee’s needs.  They call this dynamic “mass career customization” (MCC) , and this is the book that tells the story. 

Deloitte is normalizing the need for flexibility: it’s no longer seen as an accommodation or a one-time need that will evaporate at some point (and the sooner the better!).   Rather, Deloitte is acting as if anyone could need an  unconventional schedule or workload during any or all of their working years, so better to be nimble enough to roll with these needs rather than lose the employee.   The result is a robust and committed workforce with extraordinary capacity.   Because the company benefits, I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future.

According the Professor Myra Hart of Harvard Business School, ”With an MCC approach, corporations are not saying, ‘I want only your good years or the years in which you can make a maximum contribution.’  Instead, corporations are saying to  employees, ‘We really want a lifetime contract with you.’  This is a very new approach to employee retention.”

Shelly Lazarus, Chairman & CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, writes, “Finally, a book recognizing that the needs of today’s knowledge workers are far from a women-only issue. Mass Career Customization provides an incisive analysis of what’s really happening on the talent front and a comprehensive approach of what to do about it.”

I can’t say it reads as fast as fiction, but it’s a great read.  You may think you’re reading fiction when you see what’s going on at Deloitte.   Check it out.

 What do you call a working mother whose kids have grown up and left home?  She’s no longer a “working mother” as we’ve all come to know and understand the term.  I’ve come up with the term “Working Mom Emeritus.”  What do you think?  Is there a more concise way to express this?  

There are a lot of us out here.  Our kids are now in their 20s and 30s, and some of them are beginning to have children of their own.  Some of us are even involved in the care of those kids, our grandchildren.  

Here’s what I can tell you about work life balance from the other side of the intensive parenting years.  It gets vastly simpler.  Not necessarily easier, because if you have a tendency to be a workaholic, well, there’s even more opportunity to do so when you’re not committed to getting to the ice hockey game or having a decent dinner on the table by 6:30.  But it does get simpler.

For one thing, there are fewer stakeholders.  After the intensive parenting years, it’s just you and possibly a significant other in your primary circle.  It’s not that your adult children want nothing to do with you.  Hopefully, you play your cards in such a way and are lucky enough that you are still part of their lives and vice versa.  But you’re just not in their lives in the same daily, intensive way.  And it’s really OK.

And then there’s your work, which of course can consume your whole life.  The challenge is to stay conscious and intentional about how you allocate your time and where you draw your boundaries.  

For some of us, it was easier to have firm boundaries around work when our other time went to our very compelling other priority: our children.  When there are no children at home, there is a very real risk of giving it all away to work.  Particularly for driven women who have not yet “made their mark” and for women in challenging financial straits.  

But the beautiful little non-intuitive secret is that giving it all away is not sustainable.  Being completely out of balance with overwork is like trying to run a marathon without drinking any water.  You crash and burn.  You can’t finish the event.  The ONLY way to finish an endurance event is to hydrate along the way.  Which translates into doing the things that nourish you for the long haul, whatever they are for you.  For most people that includes having regular time off from task list mindset.